Joe Firestone: Organizational Knowledge Management

"Need to Know", "Need to Share"

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:57:49 GMT

The Evening of the Deluge (J. W. M. Turner, 1843)

"The Need to Know" and "The Need to Share"

I think I'd like to take a break from "The Poverty of Communitarianism" for awhile and consider some other matters. One of these is politics. Today, the 9/11 Commission released its long-awaited report. The rare display of bi-partisan unity, directness, and commitment to the need for reform was notable in this campaign season. Lee Hamilton, the Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, in his initial summary remarks at the Press Conference accompanying the formal release of the report, said that we need a basic change of attitude in the intelligence community from "the need to know" to "the need to share". And Hamilton as well as other Commissioners emphasized the fragmentation of information about terrorism before 9/11 and the need for structural change in the US intelligence community to facilitate both an end to fragmentation and integration of information to let us see the patterns of terrorist activity and threat. Of course, there is little to argue with in this diagnosis from the point of view of First Generation Knowledge Management. The commission found "stovepipes" in the intelligence community aided and abetted by the doctrine of "the Need to Know", and the cure for that problem seems most immediately to be the integration of stovepipes and the substitution of "the Need to Know" with "the Need to Share." But will this recommendation really make us safer? Is it only information integration that we need to thwart the terrorists?

"The Need To Know" Can Mean Different Things

Of course, my answer to these last questions is that information integration will not make us safer, because we need more than just that to thwart the terrorists. In fact, what else we need is to "know" more about what the terrorists are likely to do. So apart from "The Need to Share" we also have "The Need to Know" but, of course, my "Need to Know" is not the same as "The Need To Know" Lee Hamilton was talking about. That "Need to Know" is about a situation where information or knowledge already exists in the intelligence community and access to it is restricted by security regulations in such a way that it is "stovepiped" and is unavailable to people in the community who need it to solve problems. In other words, that "Need to Know" is a negative doctrine about constraints that produces fragmentation and mal-integration of our intelligence knowledge base.

In contrast, our current "Need to Know" is about situations where the information or knowledge we need to make a decision does not exist and our problem is the knowledge gap between what we know and what we need to know. This "Need to Know" is about the need to solve problems effectively and about new policies in the intelligence community that will enable better success at making new knowledge that works against the terrorists.

"The Need to Know" and "Groupthink"

This second meaning of "Need to Know" brings us to the recent report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. While recognizing "stovepiping" as a problem, that report also attacked "groupthink" at the highest levels and attributed our intelligence failures to it. But what is "groupthink"? Stripped down to its essentials, "groupthink" is a problem solving process in which the range of tentative solutions and the range of criticism and evaluation of them are restricted so as to bias knowledge production towards the dominant opinion in the group. As much as we need information integration and to instill "The Need to Share", we need even more to ensure that our new better integrated intelligence community has healthy and "open" problem solving patterns. We need such patterns to encourage members of the community to create innovative solutions that have been subjected to and have survived our best efforts to refute them.

The danger in current proposals for a new Intelligence Directorate is not that they won't solve the problem of information integration, but that they may do so at the expense of imagination, creativity, and critical evaluation of proposed solutions to problems and intelligence estimates. In that case we will have more failures, more commissions, and more reorganizations, but no solutions to our intelligence problems.

"Fighting the Last War"

In the end, the 9/11 commission investigated 9/11 exhaustively and made recommendations for how another 9/11 can be avoided. But what about another Iraq? What about another 9/11 where the problem is not fragmentation of information, but a "glut" of conflicting information all integrated in the new National Directorate of Intelligence? If our objective is information integration, I'm sure the 9/11 commission is right in recommending a new National Directorate of intelligence with real authority over the community. But authority is always a two-edged sword. It can create the greater integration of information we need, along with a greater capacity for rapid response to threats. But, we must also see to it that the new Directorate runs an "open", adaptive, intelligence enterprise. And that means building both more creativity and more criticism into the intelligence gathering and estimation process. In reorganizing the intelligence community, we must not "fight the last war". We must build not just to fulfill "The Need to Share", but also to fulfill the real "Need to Know", the need to solve problems, to close knowledge gaps, that arise in the course of their intelligence work.

Poverty -- Summing Up Act-KM

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:20:54 GMT

M31

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Summing Up Act-KM

So where does act-KM fit? Is it a communitarian system? Is political communitarianism its characteristic form of politics. Is epistemological communitarianism its dominant theory of Knowledge Claim Evaluation? I'll summarize the record, and draw some conclusions in this post. But first, let's review some of the basic concepts relevant to our analysis.

Review of Concepts

Epistemological Communitarianism includes a theory of knowledge claim evaluation which makes an appeal to a consensus or community-held view as a basis for justifying knowledge claims as true and certain, or, more recently, as probable, or at least, acceptable. Epistemological communitarianism, doesn't just lead to impoverished results: it leads to holding basic ideas beyond questioning and test. It closes off the possibility of change in these ideas and thus restricts the range of adaptations and co-evolution available to us in the face of environmental change.

The alternative to justificationism is criticalism, the idea that adds to fallibilism the notion that we are rational only to the extent that we hold our knowledge claims open to continuous criticism and testing in order to eliminate the errors in them. Criticalism, like justificationism, represents a general category of theories of evaluation. Just as epistemological communitarianism is a type of justificationism, critical rationalism, comprehensively critical rationalism, critical coherentism, and critical scientific realism are types of criticalism.

Political Communitarianism is a form of political system in which decisions are made according to the perceived consensus of the system's members. It is different from Democracy in that it does not specify majority rule or formal voting as mechanisms for decision making, though it sometimes may make use of these. Instead, a group elite, with the authority to make binding decisions, attempts to make these on the basis of attempts to evaluate what that consensus is on a particular issue. It is a salient characteristic of political communitarianism that the elite views itself as representing the community and as obligated to make any decision about the group on which there is a perceived consensus. That is, the elite recognizes no limits on the community's authority to legitimize its decisions by the means of perceived consensus.

Thus, political communitarianism, like Greek Democracy and Rousseau's popular democracy, is not a constitutional political system. From the viewpoint of adaptation, it restricts membership in the system to those who accept the consensus norms, and thereby, ceteris paribus, it restricts the adaptive range of the community, because it restricts the variety of opinions, ideas, and creative expressions available to it.

Political Communitarianism in Act-KM

Act-KM is wedded to political communitarianism. You can see it in the way many group members as well as group moderators acted when Mark and I vigorously and persistently expressed views they disagreed with.

Members believe that there is nothing inappropriate about writing to moderators to urge action against those expressing views they don't agree with if those views are expressed persistently. Of course, these members claim that they are bothered by such things as style of expression, length of posts, the fact that posts are "boring", and sometimes rudeness of those they disagree with. However, they almost never complain about these characteristics when posts they agree with exhibit them.

In addition, some members feel quite comfortable about sanctioning other members whose views they disagree with by commenting on their posting styles and by rudely asking them to stop posting. During December of 2003, in the period leading up to Incident One, both Sylvia Marshall and Serena Joyner spoke directly to the theory posters trying to "shush" them. On 12/08/03 there were 5 posts, including Sylvia Marshall's expressing discomfort over the strong disagreements and personal tone being expressed in the theory posts. Serena Joyner's "Drowning out the little Voices" post on 12/16/03, described her "feeling a little swamped . . . drowned out by this incessant, highly theoretical, "your camp - our camp" style discussion". She also said:

"I support debate - I dislike long-winded, highly theoretical debate when it is repeated again and again. Make your case and move on! The battle won't be won here."

Joyner's rather rude "little voice" was echoed by a chorus of 12 other "little voices", all posting on 12/16/03 all supporting her call to end the theory exchanges.

Group sanctioning of theory discussions was observed again in April after a period of 20 days in which theory discussions had proceeded without visible acrimony. Then on 04/21/04 Stuart Kay posted "Cat Among the Pigeons" a post whose title seemed to crystallize discomfort with the theory exchanges. Sylvia Marshall attacked the "dramatics" and "grandstanding" of certain posters, and Robert Perey responded to one of my replies to Stuart Kay with the words "frig me". On 04/22/04, perhaps noting that these two posts went unmoderated by Mark Schenk, Stuart Kay delivered the most far reaching series of personal attacks, labels and ad hominem comments since the theory posts started in December. David Hawthorne sent in a rare (for him) post that used labeling. Greg Timbrell followed with a comment on list culture asking Mark and I to change our posting style, and, in particular to back off close examination of the logic of the views presented by other members of the community. In effect, Greg was saying it's not the practice of this group to engage in close logical analysis of posts that are often framed in a casual way by people in their spare time and that will therefore always provide opportunities for criticism. Paul James then followed with a flat request that we take our "discourse and diatribe off-line."

After Paul James's post, the community's reaction tailed off and the theory discussion also began to wind down. Public group sanctioning of theory discussions did not return in May, but there was evidently considerable off-line pressure placed on Mark Schenk to stop further postings on similar issues that began on May 17th and continued through May 26th.

For the most part these exchanges were civil and their frequency was very dense from May 17th to 24th. There were a few conflictful exchanges involving, Dave Snowden, Mark McElroy, Greg Timbrell, and myself. On the 26th, Greg expressed his great dissatisfaction with the course of interaction in the group, in a post entitled: "I Don't Think I Can Take It Anymore". He said that he had joined the group in 02/02, had participated in great discussions, and had been fascinated by the dynamics of the group, he then said:

"But lately, I find myself becoming less interested mainly because I am finding certain contributors too dominating and extremely boring.

He then finished by saying that he would turn off automatic e-mail from the group for 6-12 months and the check to see if anything was different.

Greg's post was immediately supported by Larry Chait, who objected to the length of many posts. He said:

"I believe knowledge is best and most effectively shared when done in transmissions of five sentences or less. And so I am almost done. And now my message is complete."

At that point, Mark Schenk intervened to block posting from Mark and I (to be discussed just below), Stuart Kay immediately responded with a Haiku of appreciation, and Natalie Andrews delivered a perfect expression of communitarian sentiment praising Mark saying:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)" (Emphasis added)

In addition, there were 8 other expressions of support for Mark Schenk, not including Greg Timbrell's graceful thank you.

Though May is notable for its relative absence of posts in which some members attempt to moderate others, behind the scenes opposition by members to the posts is reflected in Mark Schenk's posts to Mark and I and to the group at large. Though sanctioning in May was not public, members did not hesitate to use off-line pressure to stop the posts, and in the face of that pressure Greg's decision to lower his level of participation in the group triggered action by the moderator.

In order for it to work, political communitarianism needs both members who believe in it, who sanction other community members, and complain to moderators; and also moderators who are willing to serve those members. Mark Schenk and other act-km moderators seem to view themselves as servants and instruments of the community, as obligated to reflect the consensus of the members, and as dedicated to preserving the community and protecting it against "excessive" conflict caused by too vigorous interchange. This is reflected in Mark Schenk's various posts to the group during the theory exchanges. On 12/10/03 he said:

"We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner."

In his post of 12/16/03 he said:

"What Do We Agree On? There are many more points of agreement in the various 'KM camps' than there are of disagreement. Instead of fighting to obtain the 'intellectual high ground', why not a cooperative effort to identify the points of agreement. I think a list of concepts or principles that we agree on is much more valuable than tedious debate over issues that make me wonder if we can't see the wood for the trees."

On 05/27/04 he said:

"Regrettably, we have today taken action to temporarily remove posting privileges for a number of list participants. We hope that we can devise some model or agreement by which all can continue to participate. This action has been taken in response to overwhelming input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism. In the end; however, the decision reflects our belief that a vital community, albeit imperfect, is better than no community at all."

Mark is clearly dedicated to the idea that his role is to moderate conflict, perhaps even foster agreement, and also to respond to "the overwhelming input" from members. He also thought nothing of abandoning a level playing field by restricting the posting rights of the targets of those who asked for moderation. And, evidently, he did so very much on the basis of the number of people who complained and who unsubscribed. And he did this regardless of whether the behavior of those to be censored was civil, or if not entirely so, at least far less uncivil than many of those who were doing the complaining.

His actions also suggest he believes that members of act-km have no basic and inalienable individual rights of self-expression relating to their substantive views that cannot be limited by the community at large if it decides to do so. All "the community" has to do is provide evidence, through behind-the-scenes complaints to the moderator, that it wishes to censor those expressions, and Mark and the committee of act-km moderators will act. Not only did Mark Schenk and his committee bar future postings from Mark and I (most recently for a two month period), and in relation to a particular thread (during December), even Dave Snowden, but before taking such action he and they tolerated uncivil posts from those defending prevailing views. This was done even when the expression of our views was polite, or at least far more polite than the responses of defenders of more popular views.

Relativism and Epistemological Communitarianism in Act-KM

In an earlier blog post, covering the events of 12/03, I said that the record during December indicated that the community eschewed criticalism and practiced some form of justificationism, but I couldn't conclude that epistemological communitarianism was the dominant form of knowledge claim evaluation in act-km.

The exchanges in April and May reinforced the general pattern of opposition to criticalism and knowledge claim evaluation in the group. Criticism was generally approached in a gingerly fashion and it was the practice to end critical exchanges quickly and move on. Also, the opinion that there were many valid points of view on some issue, many ways of looking at a particular problem, and that no one point of view was better than any other was expressed on a number of occasions. Further, the view that there is no "absolute truth" was expressed in a number of posts.

In addition, throughout December 2003, and April and May of 2004, some members of the group expressed opposition to all lengthy discussions of issues, which, of course, means that they opposed all in-depth exploration of issues in the group. In turn, however, that implies they also oppose the introduction of any close criticism of the logic of ideas, in an effort to eliminate errors in such ideas, and to determine which of our many ideas is false, since this kind of exchange often requires lengthy discussions of them. All of the above suggests that the reigning epistemology for knowledge processing in act-km is not epistemological communitarianism, but relativism (a form of justificationism that denies an objective external reality or criterion for truth, and regards all truth and certainty as personal, local, and ‘relative’ to an individual – i.e., anti-foundationalist, but not anti-justificationist).

Of course, the pattern of interaction between other members of act-km, and Mark and I was different. In exchanges with us, there was a greater focus on the logic of argument during exchanges. And, of course, our posts reflected the belief that some knowledge claims were true and others false and that one of the important purposes of exchange in the group was to decide which ones were false. The pattern of practice in exchanges with us evidently created angst and controversy in the group. It was a pattern the group resisted strongly indicating that its opposition to criticalism and, critical rationalism, the specific version of criticalism that our posts embodied, and its support for relativism is a group attribute that endured from December 2003 through May 2004.

Even though relativism was the dominant ideology of knowledge processing in act-km, it was not the only epistemology characteristic of it. To see this we need to keep in mind the three-tier model I've written about in a previous post on Knowledge Management and Strategy. Focusing on that model for a moment, please note that the epistemology used by act-km members in their knowledge processing may be different from the epistemology they use at the level of Knowledge Management.

At the level of Knowledge Management, act-km members and the moderators seem to hold the idea that the theory of evaluation in knowledge processing should be relativism, and that it is beyond questioning, test, criticism, or even discussion. They all seem to believe that the knowledge claim that there are many competing "truths", all equally good, has been "enacted" and negotiated in their community, and that it is what the community believes and what it should practice. This, of course, is epistemological communitarianism. And it is the basis for the political communitarianism that proved so strong in act-km.

That is, it is because Mark and I tried to transcend relativism in the group by using close logical analysis to criticize the views of members that our posts were eventually blocked. This practice was opposed to the live-and-let-live attitude that others took toward logical analysis. Their attitude is necessary for relativism. The use of logic cannot be allowed to demonstrate that certain views are the product of faulty logic, or contain self-contradictions, or are impossibly vague, because that contradicts the idea that all views are equally valuable, but differing, perspectives on the same problem. That is, close logical analysis, when used to compare competing views, undermines relativism, and questions the basic theory of knowledge claim evaluation accepted by the act-km community. It, and the regulative ideal of seeking the truth, that we advocated along with it, are in direct contradiction with relativism. And the practice necessary to apply critical rationalism is different from the dominant practice in act-km embodying relativism. What is consistent with relativism, is the practice, common in act-km, of presenting alternative views to others, along with sharing information, even critical exchanges in which one side says "I disagree and here is my perspective." And this is the kind of interchange which normally prevails there. But again, what we don't see much of, outside of the context of exchanges with Mark and I, are attempts to say, "here is my alternative view, and I believe there are various problems with your own view, including problems with its logic". Because to say something like this is go against relativism and question the group consensus on it supported by epistemological communitarianism at the KM level.

Finally, will epistemological communitarianism in act-km spread beyond KM to knowledge processing? Will it replace relativism as the dominant theory of evaluation in knowledge processing in the community? I think there is some chance of that happening, but there are also forces maintaining relativism, as well. Relativism is favored by the desire of members of act-km to avoid conflict with one another, and to maintain a rough equality of professional status and recognition. The successful functioning of the community in sharing members' knowledge claims also favors the maintenance of relativism, since sharing in the group doesn't imply that "my knowledge is better than yours." The strong individualist and democratic tradition in Australia also works for relativism because it favors maintaining rough equality in the community.

Working against relativism is the evolution of support for certain positions and the natural desires of members of the group for individual recognition. The standards movement, for example, affords recognition to some, but not to others. It is also a model of epistemological communitarianism, no matter how frequently its supporters explain that their standards are not normative, but only informative.

Further, the more discussions in act-km focus on one or a few conceptual approaches the greater will be the tendency for that approach to be perceived as the consensus approach of the community. When that happens, the community's prior acceptance of the norm of avoiding both criticalism, and close logical analysis of ideas, will begin to favor the consensus-backed ideas. It will do this because even though new ideas can be stated in the group, they will be incapable, in the absence of fair comparison using logical analysis, of contributing to the falsification of the dominant views.

Over a period of time then, a paradigm will develop in the act-km group, and epistemological communitarianism backing that paradigm will set in. The very laxity of knowledge claim evaluation under relativism will become a barrier to change, and to the acceptance, as opposed to the mere stating of new ideas. Eventually however, even stating new ideas will become difficult because members of the group will fear looking silly if they state new ideas in opposition to the old paradigm. At that point, epistemological and political communitarianism will support each other and constitute a stable communitarian system organized around the dominant paradigm of standards and a popular conceptual approach. I'll leave it to the membership of act-km to guess which approach it will be.

Postscript

I'd like to thank Mark McElroy, my continuing close collaborator and sounding board for contributing to this and the other blog posts in this series on communitarianism. His insights have been of tremendous help in accounting for whatever quality these posts may have. And while he does not bear responsibility for my specific views, he has said that he wishes to associate himself with the general critique of communitarianism in KM list serv groups expressed in this series.

In addition to the books and classes referred to in the margins on this page, you’ll find much more information on the theories and models underlying this post at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on The New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or www.bhusa.com.

Poverty -- Incident Two

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 17:21:09 GMT

Guilin

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- Incident Two

This post continues with my account of events in act-km in May 2004.

The Incident

Just before my post and David Paterson's, recorded in my last blog post, Greg Timbrell expressed his great dissatisfaction with the course of interaction in the group, in a post entitled: "I Don't Think I Can Take It Anymore". He said that he had joined the group in 02/02, had participated in great discussions and had been fascinated by the dynamics of the group, he then said:

"But lately, I find myself becoming less interested mainly because I am
finding certain contributors too dominating and extremely boring.

So its time to turn off my automatic email delivery and take a break for
6-12 months or so. Maybe things will be different then

See you in a while."

On May 26th, Greg's post was supported by Larry Chait. Larry evidently objected to the length of many posts. He said:

"I believe knowledge is best and most effectively shared when done in transmissions of five sentences or less. And so I am almost done. And now my message is complete."

On May 27th, Mark Schenk, the moderator of the group sent the following off-line e-mail to Mark and I:

"Hi Joe and Mark,

The manner and level of your participation in the actKM group is causing considerable angst within this community. The main concerns are the frequency with which your posts contravene actKM netiquette in terms of posting length, and the prolific and dominating manner in which you are pursuing your agenda.

Due to the number of complaints regarding your behaviour and its impact upon the actKM community, and the dramatic rise in members unsubscribing (a number of whom having stated they are doing so as a direct result of your combined influence upon the group), the actKM committee wishes to advise that no postings from either of you will be forwarded to the list for at least the next two months (until August 2004).

I hope that during this period we can devise some model or agreement whereby you can continue to participate in the group in a manner that adds value to both the community and yourselves. I would welcome your suggestions as to how this might work.

This decision makes no judgement regarding either your opinions or agendas. It simply acknowledges that the manner in which you are pursuing them is having a serious negative impact upon the actKM community.

Regards
Mark Schenk
Convenor, actKm"

Mark Schenk also posted an announcement to the group, entitled "act-km Revisited", in which he said:

I hope that everyone takes time to read this message.

The ActKM Forum is a learning community dedicated to building knowledge about public sector knowledge management. It aims to provide an environment where members can create and share knowledge about public sector knowledge management issues. ActKM is a not-for-profit incorporated association that relies heavily on a small group of volunteers to moderate this group, organise our annual conference, manage the website and run our annual KM Awards.

We rely on the much larger group of people who participate and share with so much openness and goodwill on this list server to provide
the true sense of community that makes actKM what it is.

Our intent has always been for the list to self-manage, and self-moderate. This approach has proven very successful, until the last
six months, during which time list behaviour has been the cause of considerable angst for all (most?) concerned. We have continued
(with a few notable exceptions) the policy of letting the group self-moderate in the hope that 'things would sort themselves out'. This
has not happened.

Regrettably, we have today taken action to temporarily remove posting privileges for a number of list participants. We hope that
we can devise some model or agreement by which all can continue to participate. This action has been taken in response to overwhelming
input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism. In the end; however, the decision
reflects our belief that a vital community, albeit imperfect, is better than no community at all.

So, enough of the sombre tone, lets get some practical sharing happening...

Regards

Mark Schenk"

Mark's post was greeted with some favorable comment by 8 members of the group (including many who had contributed to the lengthy discussions), between May 27^th, and June 6^th. For example, on May 28^th, Stuart Kay contributed a Haiku:

"A sudden silence
Sense the quiet spaciousness
Gently to be filled"

And on the same day Natalie Andrews said:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)" (Emphasis added)

And on May 31st, Greg Timbrell thanked Mark saying:

"For your emails of support and understanding
For exercising courage in your convictions
For relieving us of a heavy burden
For letting me be part of a community that I value
For informing me of what happened over the last week.

Now lets move on. . ."

Political Communitarianism in Act-KM in May 2004

There's not much doubt about the presence of political communitarianism in act-km in May 2004. Mark Schenk's post to Mark McElroy and myself spoke of the angst caused by our posts. He spoke of the excessive length of our posts and our prolific and dominating behavior. But what did we do?

The record shows that we did nothing but express our views and then respond to the views of others directed at us. No proof is present in the record that our posts are longer than others delivered in response to us. No proof is present that we were any more dominating than Dave Snowden or Stuart Kay, or others presenting their views on these subjects. According to the record, summarized above, our language during this period is, with one exception, less personal, intemperate, and ad hominem than the language of others responding to us. Further, no mention is made by Mark Schenk of the effect of our interlocutors' posts on the group. As the old saying goes "it takes two to tango", and we had a lot of help from others in keeping those debates going. So why were we singled out?

Adopting a broader comparative perspective, if we consider the level of conflict present in the period leading up to Incident One, and the level of conflict present during the April 2004 exchanges, the May interactions, though very frequent, were not nearly as conflictful and far less uncivil. In fact, there is a progressive increase in civility when we move from the December exchanges, through the April exchanges, and on to the May exchanges, as if act-km was beginning to adapt to the new views and posting styles Mark McElroy and I were introducing into the group.

The answer lies in Mark Schenk's statement to Mark and I:

". . . Due to the number of complaints regarding your behaviour and its impact upon the actKM community, and the dramatic rise in members unsubscribing (a number of whom having stated they are doing so as a direct result of your combined influence upon the group) the actKM committee wishes to advise that no postings from either of you will be forwarded to the list for at least the next two months (until August 2004)."

And in his announcement to the group:

". . . This action has been taken in response to overwhelming input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism."

In other words, the sanctions Mark Schenk took were motivated by complaints about our posts (that is, the "behaviour" of others, and not our "behaviour") and by unsubscriptions from the group. And Mark Schenk responded to these and to the trigger of Greg Timbrell's complaint and unsubscription, with his sanctions toward us. In doing so, Mark Schenk was responding to what he thought the community wanted, not to anything we did, and he did this without any regard to any "individual rights" that we might be expected to enjoy as participating members of the group.

Mark McElroy provided a very good analysis of the situation when, in his off-line final post to Mark Schenk on May 27th, he characterized communitarianism as:

"a type of social system in which ideas are accepted or rejected, sanctioned or not, or tolerated or not, depending upon whether or not the community consensus goes along with them.

Now the role of the moderator in such a system is strikingly characteristic because the moderator is, of course, there to exercise a "moderation" ethic. Everything is held to a community-centric test of acceptability. In communitarian systems, this is viewed as normal and quite acceptable. This is because a higher value is placed on consensus and harmony in such systems than on reason or truth. Both are expendable. Thus, probing inquiry and dialogue in such systems can only go so far. As soon as the level of discourse exceeds a certain threshold of disharmony or disagreement, communitarian rules come into play with a vengeance. The pretense of genuine inquiry is dropped, and the heavy hand of the community enforcer comes out of the woodwork - your hand, in this case.

Indeed, why have "moderators" at all? Only communitarian systems require them. That is, they need to moderate deviations from the norm in order to keep things in conformance with the community, consensus point of view. They need to moderate! Anything that threatens the prevailing paradigm is destabilizing, unwelcome, and must be censored - must be moderated. Ideas that threaten the status quo must be stopped, their proponents excommunicated, and the harmony and moderation of the group restored.

. . . In addition to the authoritarian and capricious role conferred on moderators in communitarian systems, there is the unchallenged assumption that any list member can approach the moderator, declare a breach of the communitarian ethic by some other member, and legitimately expect that the moderator will bow to their wishes. Members are free to engage in capricious witch hunts with the full expectation that moderators will bow to their wishes."

And all this is justified and motivated by the idea that the ultimate source of legitimacy in communities is the community itself, that only it has rights, and that its will must always be realized. Natalie Andrews made my point well in her post supporting Mark Schenk's action:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)"

Mark Schenk was only acting in accordance with "the General Will" in blocking our posts.

Postscript

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part Three

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 18:16:37 GMT

Peaks

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part Three

This post continues with my report of the act-km interaction leading to incident two.

Winding Down

In the first post of May 21st, I replied to Stuart Kay's "loud agreement" post saying:

"I think we are mostly in loud agreement, and I think it's true that in many organizations, Management strategy-based KM allows KM to encourage criticism, including criticism of management strategy, because the managers are wise enough to know that such criticism is good for them and the adaptive capacity of their organizations. Having said that, surely you can see that to define KM as an activity that must be aligned with corporate strategy, is to both exclude from the scope of KM, activities that are not aligned with corporate strategy, and also to provide a license to autocratic organizations to use KM in ways that are not consistent with its mission of building organizational adaptive capacity?"

Dave Snowden then responded to my previous comment on his post by thanking me for a "reasoned reply." He went on to explain further what he meant by "linear definition", explaining that it required a sequential relationship between strategy and KM. He also pointed out that Boards sometimes do concern themselves with KM, but that he thinks that the general trend of an increase in Board influence will begin to be reversed as the memory of Enron fades. He also mentioned factors other than too little Board influence that may account for corporate scandals.

Stuart Kay then sent in a reply to my post to him saying that he could see that the outcomes of KM's subordination to management-based strategy I pointed out previously were possible but that my statement was "loaded with assumptions" that "are not universally true." Dave Snowden then responded to Mark's post. He criticized "the extreme response to the use of "naïve" " and expressed his irritation at not being able to engage in conversation on multiple list servs without being subject to postings of this type. He also stated that such postings can destroy participation, but that "openness has its price." He declined to modify his original statement.

The next post was my response to Dave's post to me. I began by agreeing with most of what he said and then continued:

"but I also think that organizational forms can constrain the development and content of ideational structures over time, and I have problems with the notion of "inevitability" here. In any event, I think that a KM function that is Governance-based can help to keep the enterprise "open" and distributed in its problem solving capability, and I will, along with others who are beginning to write in this vein (Mark, Dale Neef, Don Tapscott, Bill Hall, and others), continue to make the case."

Dave then responded to me off-line, sending a note in which we exchanged final thoughts on the role of Governance-based KM from the point of view of dynamics in a complexity framework. We also both agreed that we had moved much closer as a result of our discussion.

The next post was Mark's response to Stuart Kay's question: Mark suggested that openness in knowledge processing would prevent some people from lying, cheating, and stealing, and would expose others. He also suggested that it would enhance innovation, and ended by saying that all of the above was of fiduciary concern, and "that is why KM ought to report to the governance function . . ." My next post was a response to Bill Hall's contribution relating our Governance-based approach to KM to complexity and autopoiesis and to Popper's work. I thanked Bill for making the connections, followed with some references to literature and then argued against the view that the Governance-based approach was "naïve", "utopian", or unrealistic. I pointed out that many innovations are initially viewed in these terms, that labels liked these often indicate opposition to the change involved, and that while there are many reasons of convenience that may explain such opposition, these are not reasons for believing that the Governance-based approach is wrong, or unrealistic, or naive. It is just evidence that the Governance-based approach to KM and The New KM, more generally, is a social innovation. In the next post I replied to Stuart's claim that I made universal assumptions saying "I did not think I said they were universally true. All organizations are not autocratic and all KM activities are not inconsistent with strategy. But how do these facts impact the point I was making?"

Jeff Popova-Clark then responded to my earlier post asking: "So are you saying that you are basing your disagreement with AS5037 on the assumption that management will create goals that are inconsistent with the long-term goals (or purposes for existence) of an organisation?" Bala Pillai began the exchanges of May 23 by agreeing with the case I made in my response to Bill Hall for the view that the Governance-based approach is not "utopian". Bala urged that we not simply assume limitations in our choices and possibiities. Bill Hall then answered Raymind Cheung's post by offering simple definitions of "knowledge", "management", and "knowledge management". Anne Day thanked Bill, while saying she did not have time to read every little bit sent to the list.

Stuart Kay then responded to my last note to him by saying that while I didn't claim that my assumptions were universally true my conclusions were based on them and that if my assumptions were not universally valid, then neither is my conclusion. He then said: "To adopt your principle from the other debate about definitions and standards, your conclusion is therefore falsifiable." I answered quickly and asked him which assumptions and conclusions he had in mind. Stuart answered and quoted a passage from our (Mark's and mine) paper on the Governance-based approach and showed that the assertions in the sentence were not universally valid and were "falsifiable". Stuart then quickly sent in another post in which he said:

"I dispute your conclusion that KM <cannot> be management based if that conclusion is based on the foregoing assumptions which I think are falsifiable. I also dispute your conclusion that the governance based approach results in <entirely different priorities> than a management based approach, again if your conclusion is dependent on those assumptions which I think are falsifiable."

Bala Pillai then posted a response to Bill Hall's definitions saying: "KM is the art of fueling the impossible, the possible and the acumen to know when to do which."

David Rymer began activity on May 24th by responding to my critiques of AS 5037. He offered the following criticisms along with frequent appeals to the authority inhering in standards committees and the ISO. "First your "Governance" model as an emerging area of development currently lacks the demonstrated track record or wide spread level of adoption in this country required for incorporation in a standard." Second, "your focus on Governance vs Management seems to have limited application in Government and community organisations which are major constituencies for the committee." Third, in his organization (The Law Council of Australia), the practitioners also manage and are on the Board so the problems we refer to are not applicable. Fourth, he finds the language I use "too linear, managerial, mechanistic and process oriented to adopt in my own day-to-day KM interactions." Fifth, he characterizes the Governance-based approach as one that "sounds like a 90's solution to an 80's problem when we're trying to work out what 2010 will look like!" And sixth, "The vast majority of people who criticise AS 5037 appear never to have read it!"

On May 25th, I offered a detailed response to David Rymer's post. To his first point, I replied that we were not proposing the idea of the Governance-based approach as a standard but pointing out that making alignment with strategy a requirement of the standard is the problem, not failing to endorse or approve of the untried Governance-based approach. I also said that since the standard that had been proposed excluded Governance-based KM as a possibility, it was demonstrably false. I also said that no amount of conventionalism and positive support for such a definition from practitioners and standards committees in Australia, or elsewhere in the world will remove the prima facie difficulty in contending that Governance-based KM is not KM. I then answered his second and third points by saying that the example he gave from his own organization in which practitioners, management, and board membership overlap, doesn't speak to whether our approach is generally relevant or not to those organizations where there is little overlap. I then pointed to many examples in government where Governance-based KM may have been helpful.

I next answered his fourth point concerning my language by pointing out that he was engaging in labeling and asked him to document his charge with quotations. I then described his fifth point as an ad hominem attack, and as a second exercise in labeling. Then I answered the attack anyway by asking some very leading questions about the relevance of the Governance-based approach to contemporary problems. Finally, I answered his last point by saying that it:

"is either another instance of an ad hominem attack, or simply irrelevant to my post. But in case you meant it to be relevant, I point out that it is not a comment on whether my criticism in any way misconstrues AS 5037. If you believe it does, let's see your analysis with appropriate quotations, If you don't think it does, then what's the point of implying that I've not read the AS 5037 definition of KM?"

This last exchange with David Rymer was somewhat conflictful. I hope it is clear however, that it was David who produced three unmoderated efforts at labeling or ad hominems, and that I only answered these, pointing out their logical status and invalidity.

Stuart Kay then offered a response to my reply to David, saying: "I expect I am going to cop flak for this, but I am foolish enough to do it anyway... ", Stuart proceeded to claim that, contrary to my implication in responding to David, the Bush administration engaged in high quality knowledge processing since it did a very effective job of suppressing information that didn't accord with their policy, and exaggerated information that did. I responded to Stuart by listing the Bush administration's shortcomings in knowledge claim formulation, and knowledge claim evaluation, including their failure to be self-critical and to consider alternative points of view about the post-war occupation, and the implications of what the consequences would be if their assumptions and forecasts were wrong. I summarized by saying that I thought their manipulation of the US into war was masterful, but that their calculations about what outcomes they would need to cope with were incompetent. David Paterson also responded to Stuart asking why his comments should "create any flack."

In my next post I'll describe Incident Two.

Postscript

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part Two

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 20:40:41 GMT

Clouds at Sunset

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part Two

I'll continue my account of the road to incident two by describing further group interaction on May 20, 2004, a very busy day of exchanges.

Sharper Disagreements

Stuart Kay then entered the discussion with a lengthy, entirely civil, contribution centered around a fictional illustrative example entitled "Lost in Translation". After relating the example, he said:

"So where does this leave us? It seems to me that it leaves us at the point that KM is both a governance and a strategic alignment issue.

'Knowledge' itself is critical to the success of any organisation ('knowledge' is an integral part of governance). KM as a discipline, or a 'knowledge organisation' within an organisation, is only 'necessary' if essential to the survival of the broader organisation; if not 'necessary' then it is 'useful' to the extent that:

- knowledge sharing within the organisation is not optimal; and
- the benefits of the KM function / knowledge organisation outweigh its costs.

Is there, then, in the debate on this list a simple misunderstanding? Is one group talking about clever use (management) of 'knowledge' (implicitly and naturally integral to governance; and necessary for organisational adaptiveness), whilst another group is talking about the separately identified functional process of 'knowledge management' (an explicit component of the function of governance)? Is it really a difference in conceptual paradigm or is it in the shift of knowledge processing from the implicit to the explicit, or vice versa, that the difference in views arises?"

The next relevant post was my reply to Robert Kay's earlier response. I expressed appreciation of the standard committee's recognition that there are multiple definitions of KM and that their own was not absolute truth. My reply then focused on presenting various questions in order to confront Robert with the difficulties in his position that the "standard" definition was merely "informative" and not prescriptive. I explained that if it was not prescriptive, but was informative, it had to be descriptive. But if it was descriptive how could it be a standard, and why was it not true or false? I also replied to Robert Kay's argument that we should do standards now, by saying that I didn't think the choice was between doing standards now and waiting for some distant day when everyone will agree on what KM is. Rather, I said, we could just wait (say 5-10 years) until we have more general agreement on important principles and concepts.

Dave Snowden responded to Stuart Kay's post with an expression of approval for his illustrative example. Raymond Cheung responded to Dave's earlier post with the observation that our discussion had lost track of the original query and with request for simplification of the whole discussion and specifically for others to provide simple definitions of "knowledge", "management" and "knowledge management." Next, I responded to Dave Snowden's "naïve" post by pointing out that:

"We all know that Management has great power in organizations. The issue here is whether Governance-based KM can moderate that a bit by creating an independent center of power in the organization and introducing a more Open Enterprise in the knowledge processing realm. We say it can, you say it can't. But your arguments just above don't really speak to that question."

I then proceeded to express agreement with his point on "retrospective coherence," and I agreed that corroboration was needed for theories, and not merely support.

I next replied to Stuart Kay's post, by agreeing with some of it, but also disagreeing at various specific points. I summarized my discussion by saying:

"I think Mark and I are talking about both general adaptiveness and about formal structures that should be subordinate to Governance, but not to Management. And it is because we are concerned about adaptiveness that we favor the Governance-based approach. In my view, once again, KM is a function that is always present in human systems. In its informal state it is not subordinate to management and its strategy. When we institutionalize KM by establishing formal knowledge organizations, the question arises, "where shall KM be located in the formal organizational structure?"

Our answer is that it should be located within Governance because:

High quality knowledge processing resulting in high quality knowledge in use is of vital importance for all organizational functions, and KM is for creating high quality knowledge processing. Just because, as you have shown, other organizational functions are more vital than KM for immediate survival, Management will generally be biased against the KM function, constraining it in various ways over time. This is likely to result in lower quality knowledge for the organization as a whole, making it less adaptive than it otherwise would be. To prevent this, we must recognize the conflict of interest between Management and high quality KM and entrust oversight of it to a function that is less involved in day-to-day concerns than Management, and more involved with the longer-term fate of the organization. That function is Governance."

Jeff Popova-Clark responded to my response to Robert Kay by making the point that "the Governance-based approach to KM (as described by your paper) is consistent with KM being aligned with strategy (i.e. long term strategy = purpose of organisational existence - see my previous post)." He also pointed out that "a definition does not need to attempt to be "the truth". What it needs to be is functionally useful. A definition can be merely an agreed (but otherwise arbitrary) standard by which everyone agrees to adhere." Mark McElroy (still on 05/20/04), responded to the "naïve" charge in Dave's earlier post with a lengthy message whose challenging flavor I can best convey with the following quote:

"Naïve is it? I see. Is it naïve to say that boards are elected by stockholders? Is it naïve to say that boards are accountable to their stockholders? And to regulators as well? Is it naïve to say that CEOs are hired by boards? Is it naïve to say that boards are meant to hold CEOs accountable? Is it naïve to say that stockholders expect them to do so? Is it naïve to say that boards owe their stockholders a fiduciary duty to exercise oversight over the affairs of the organization?"

The remainder of Mark's post was full of other sharp rhetorical and sarcastic questions and other comments that expressed sharp disapproval of Dave's views. It also conveyed the sense that Mark was responding to a perceived insult in Dave's characterization of our view as naïve.

Robert Kay followed Mark's response to Dave, by responding to my previous response to him. Robert indicated he would not try to resolve our differences on standards, which were unresolvable, and he repeated his views that AS 5037 could be used as a starting point for learning. He then proceeded to argue that most of my points seem to go back to requiring that definitional standards be true, and that he couldn't understand that because sometimes I seemed to agree with him that there is no absolute truth about these things. He then asserted that standards could not be absolutely true because they were incomplete. I followed Robert's post with an answer to Raymond Cheung, referring him to one of my blog posts. Stuart Kay then responded to Mark's response to Dave by asking: "Are you suggesting that good KM in a governance model (or any other model) will prevent dishonest people, or people with political agendas, from lying, cheating and stealing?" Stuart also responded to my post saying: "Mostly I think we are in loud agreement." He then proceeded to comment on a few points. First, he claimed that a general statement Mark and I had made in our paper on the Governance approach was not universally valid. He also argued that many organizations were like his own in that even though KM was aligned with Management-based strategy it was also possible for it have input into strategy.

After Stuart's post I replied to Robert Kay. I stated that I thought we had come to a stopping place in our exchange except for one point. Then I replied to his contention that I seem to require "truth" in definitions by saying that I only require that they survive testing and criticism and thus not be demonstrably false. I ended by summarizing my views on the problems of AS 5037. Next, I also replied to Jeff Popova-Clark's post. I began by pointing out that the Governance-based approach is consistent with the long-term strategy of enhancing organizational adaptive capacity. But it is not necessarily consistent with strategy as formulated by Management, which may well be inconsistent with that goal, and I reiterated that it was this point that Mark and I were making. I then answered his view that definitions need not be true, saying that nominal definitions were conventional, but that real definitions such as KM definitions said something about the world and therefore should not be false. I applied this idea to the AS 5037 and KMCI definitions of KM pointing out that AS 5037 was surely false because it excluded Governance-based KM.

In the next blog post I'll report on the exchanges of May 21st and beyond.

Postscript

I'd like to thank Mark McElroy, my continuing close collaborator and sounding board for contributing to this and the other blog posts in this series on communitarianism. His insights have been of tremendous help in accounting for whatever quality these posts may have. And while he does not bear responsibility for my specific views, he has said that he wishes to associate himself with the general critique of communitarianism in KM list serv groups expressed in this series.

In addition to the books and classes referred to in the margins on this page, you’ll find much more information on the theories and models underlying this post at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on The New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or www.bhusa.com.

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part One

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 22:07:53 GMT

Junction of the Thames and the Medway (J. W. M. Turner, 1807)

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part One

When the April theory exchanges ended on the 27th, interaction in act-km wound down for awhile. Over the next few weeks it primarily consisted of announcements and exchanges of information. Subjects included social network analysis, people taking intellectual capital with them when they retired, and organizational forgetting. Exchanges involving a greater degree of disagreement began again on May 17th, and evolved to Incident Two on May 25-27, after a high density of postings during the days leading up to May 25th. I'll describe these exchanges in a number of blogs, both to provide enough detail to give a feeling for the content of the exchanges, and also to provide a basis for analysis of the style of political interaction and knowledge claim evaluation in the community.

Initiation

Maureena Lockyer-Benzie, a newcomer to KM, asked (05/17/04) whether "the definition (AS5037) is the most appropriate. Other definitions would be appreciated." AS 5037, is the consensus-based definition of KM offered by the Australian Standards organization.

David Williams began the responses with a definition (05/17/04) based on the idea of an organizational process that uses knowledge and intellectual assets to generate organizational value. Later on that day, Patrick Lambe responded by referring to exchanges on the same subject in October 2003 that generated a lot of heat. He also said that a phenomenological definition of KM is that asking for a definition of it will produce a fight but no clarity in the concept, and he then offered the following view:

"A standard is a terribly useful thing for that very purpose - we can just pretend it's true and go about our normal business."

In other words, a standard definition is good because it resolves conflict, but not because it really introduces any clarity into the subject, or helps us to delimit its scope, or represents an addition to our knowledge.

On May 18th, Georges de Wailly stated that he agreed with Mark, and went on to state that KM is the activity of getting "the right information to the right person, in the right time, and in the right context". He also characterized KM as a "logistics of information." I responded to Maureena also by stating that there was no consensus in KM on a definition and referred her to a paper by Mark and myself discussing the issue. I also called her attention to a recent blog of ours on a Governance-based approach to KM, and pointed out that it was in conflict with AS 5037. Mark then responded to Maureena and Georges and took the position that KM definitions are "utterly political and counter-productive” and that we should not be concerned with definitions, but rather with purposes and value propositions. He then want on to criticize AS 5037 for making KM's alignment with strategy a definitional requirement, a move he characterized as the "strategy exception error".

Jeff Popova-Clark (still on 05/18/04) responded to my post on the Governance-based approach by reading our blog post and then by stating that he agreed that KM should not be subservient to short- and medium-term goals of organizations, but that it had to be subservient to the long-term goals because they are "equivalent to an organisation's very purpose for existence. . ," and if ". . . KM is not subservient to the organisation's purpose for existence then KM is using organisation resources for purposes other than the purpose of the organisation." Bala Pillai, next, supported Mark's post on definition, and Kate Andrews responded to Mark by saying that her experience indicated that organizations are relaxed about the idea that "knowledge processes should align with organisational intent." She also expanded on this point, ending by asking, reasonably: "I wonder if, when we focus on practice, some of the heat goes out of these topics?"

Early on May 19th, I responded to Kate Andrews by agreeing that sometimes the heat goes out of this topic in practice. I also asked her whether it wasn't true that if KM is normatively defined as needing to be in alignment with management strategy, that this provides a normative foundation for Management to constrain KM from encouraging norms and practices of critical evaluation of Management strategy? Next, I replied to Jeff Popova-Clark, attempting to place his remarks in a still broader perspective and pointing out that the Governance-based approach contended that KM should be aligned with the goals and objectives emerging from Governance, whether long-, medum, or short-term, rather than with the goals, objectives, and strategy emerging from Management. Kate Andrews then responded to my earlier reply by reiterating her point of view that KM should be aligned with organizational intent and that in her experience KM was dedicated to change and not the status quo.

Dave Snowden (05/19/04) next added a civil post objecting to the either/or orientation of the conversation up to that point with respect to both strategy/KM and KM definitions. He emphasized the importance for KM success of it being in alignment with corporate strategy, and also the role of definitions of starting or staging points for further development of ideas. He wrote about the co-evolution of concept and practice and presented the view that cases that are not specifically generated to test a theory, cannot provide support for it. Following Dave's post, I responded to Kate Andrews by agreeing with the substance of her post, but I also pointed out that her reply had not, in fact, addressed my two questions.

Later that day, Mark McElroy responded to Dave Snowden's post. He agreed with Dave's point that for KM to be a success, Management needs to take it seriously; but also pointed out that if KM is mandated by Governance, Management will be required to take it seriously. He went on to make the point, in contrast to Dave's strong implication, that there is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that Governance-based KM may work, and that there is also much evidence in recent corporate behavior that Management strategy-based KM does not work very well.

The next post, by myself, at once responded to the first post on definitions by Mark McElroy, an earlier post by David Williams, as well as one by Patrick Lambe. The thrust of it was to characterize definitions as elevator speeches that we could (a) accept by convention, or (b) view as synthetic statements that might be false. I illustrated the view that definitions are synthetic statements by critiquing David Williams's offering, and also by applying that view in relation to standards and Patrick's view that standards are a convenient way to avoid conflict over key concepts. I also referred the group to a recent blog post of mine explaining my view on definitions. In the next post on definitions and standards (still on 05/19), I responded to Dave Snowden's post on these questions. I agreed with much in his post, as indicated in my response to Mark, but said that I thought that the AS 5037 definition of KM was off the mark because it excluded Governance-based approaches. I then discussed the clear difference of opinion on the merits of the Governance-based approach to KM, but indicated that we had reached the end of argument on this point in previous exchanges, in my book with Mark, and in recent posts on my blog site. Finally, I indicated puzzlement at Dave's reference to "linear definition" in his post, while endorsing the notion of co-evolution of theory and practice.

Bill Hall then contributed a post in which he complimented the forum for the conversation on the 19th about definitions and alternative approaches to KM, and then proceeded to discuss organizations viewed as CASes and the implications of this view for KM. Referring to my work and Mark's, Bill indicated that working independently of us, " but from the same broad epistemological base provided by Karl Popper's later works . . . I have come to very much the same conclusions as they have about the roles and practice of KM in organisations." Bill also indicated that he thought the majority of the difficulties people have with our views is paradigmatic in nature and that he hoped that papers he was working on would bridge the communications gap. Megan Smith then offered some comments relating Gary Hamel's views on deep organizational change and innovation to the comments on organizational purposes made by Jeff Popova-Clark. She asked for comments on Hamel's emphasis on widespread employee participation in developing innovations and strategy. Mark quickly responded to Megan, pointing out that he very much agreed with Hamel and that macroinnovation was about implementing ideas about innovation very similar to Hamel's.

Intensification

Kate Andrews (still on the 19th) contributed a very short response to Mark, in which she asked:

"I wonder if others see the irony in eschewing KM definitions and standards, and advocating for diversity at the same time as characterising a strategy alignment view as 'not to be taken seriously' and 'unsustainable'?"

I responded to Kate quickly, saying:

"To eschew standards and favor diversity doesn't mean that one can't have a position of one's own, and be very critical of some alternative positions. It simply means that one must be committed to the ideas that one may be wrong, and that KM is still sufficiently young to warrant a great deal of caution in committing to standards that have not yet stood the test of time and criticism."

Until this point, the conversation begun with Maureena Lockyer-Benzie's post asking about definitions had been conducted in a very civil way focusing primarily on substance. It was largely devoid of personal attacks, ad hominems, or labeling, and had not exhibited any hints of political communitarianism.

At this point Greg Timbrell posted a response to Kate Andrews's last post. He said:

"I feel a need to respond to your post in Haiku

You speak your wise thoughts
A philosopher responds
All is lost"

And then he proceeded to inform the group of the Haiku form. In the context of my response to Kate and the back and forth between us, I think this may be seen as the first instance of labeling to occur in the course of the discussion. A number of Haiku posts, which I will not review here, followed Greg's post and proceeded in parallel with the theory discussion. One of their functions seemed to be to provide an outlet for unease or frustration over the increasing density and intensity of the theory discussion

The next important theory post was from Robert Kay, who responded to my post responding to Mark McElroy, Patrick Lambe, and David Williams. Robert referred to his experience as a member of the committee producing AS 5037, and said:

"Do any us believe that the definition in the Standard is the absolute truth on the matter - not to my knowledge. Do any of us believe we could come up with a definition that would satisfy everyone - not really. This is why in the final Standard there will be a statement alerting readers to the fact that there are multiple definitions. The definitions people use are going to be related to the context they work in, their personal histories and the histories of the contexts in which they are undertaking action - amongst other things. Consequently any definition is by definition going to be incomplete (this is not the same as false or incorrect). This is also why the Standard is intended as an informative document - not a prescriptive one."

The exchanges on definitions and standards continued on May 20th. The first post on that day to address itself to these issues was by Dave Snowden who responded to both my posts and Mark's. Dave explained what he meant by "linear definition", but without explaining why the term "linear" was properly applied. In the process he asserted again that it wasn't important whether strategy preceded KM or vice versa since these would interact. He then went on to say that he thought that our view on Governance was "naïve". But in using that adjective he did not merely "label" our view, but proceeded to explain why he thought it was naive: specifically because in most organizations Executive Management has its way with Boards anyway. The implication of this is, I suppose, that it doesn't really matter if KM is located in the Governance or the Management function. He then reiterated a previous point he had made about whether cases not developed to test a model should be used to support it. After a paragraph of argument he concluded: "Retrospective coherence is not 'evidence' that can prove a theory, it's an indicator of a possible new experiment."

I'll continue my account of the road to incident 2 in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty -- Troubled Participation: Part Two

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:02:56 GMT

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Troubled Participation: Part Two

In my last post I described part of the period of troubled participation in the act-km group during April 2004. In this post, I'll pick up the story of act-km and cover the time period through the end of April 2004.

The Expression of Angst and the Temporary Denouement (continued)

At about the same time as Greg Timbrell's post on act-km List Culture, Paul James contributed a post in response to our replies to Stuart Kay which said:

"Oh no! Stuart is being attacked by the KMCI gang again!

Joe and Mark, do us all a favour and take all of your discourse and diatribe off line! Please."

And on the 23rd, John Hargreaves said:

You have struck a chord with me here Greg. I think what you describe is similar to situations where people are 'afraid' to ask questions, concerned that they might appear naive and open to ridicule. One way of looking at such concerns is that people are worried about their egos taking a hit.

How then would it be if egos were able to be set aside, would sharing and communication be enhanced? And as a result, would learning and knowledge generation occur more easily?"

On April 23rd Mark responded to David Hawthorne's post, but not in kind. Mark avoided personal comments and ad hominems and ended by asking David what his alternative epistemology to correspondence was. Paul McDowell then responded to the increased level of tension kicked off by Stuart's first post by asking of both Mark and I:

"Given your earnest reply, and your recognition of the reactions to your interventions, then it would seem logical to wonder why you continue to use a style of communication which appears to elicit this response?"

David Hawthorne responded to Mark's post on April 25th. He answered Mark's questions without recourse to the characterizations he had engaged in earlier, and gave his views on correspondence and on Varela's views which he interpreted as opposed to correspondence. Mark responded to David early on April 26th and explained that there was nothing in David's account of Varela that precluded correspondence or suggested a retreat from reason, rather than a retreat from empiricism. I followed with an answer to Paul McDowell's question, saying that I continued to use my unpopular style of communication because I needed to exhibit a style of critical exchange that conflicted with the non-criticalist practice prevalent in the group. And that I needed to do that to illustrate practices in communities of inquiry "in which competing knowledge claims are subjected to continuous testing, error elimination, and knowledge claim evaluation in hopes of getting closer to the truth."

My response to Paul elicited the off-line response from Stuart Kay I mentioned earlier and began a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of this style. Mark also responded to Paul and, I think, expressed our joint perspective very well in these words, commenting on criticalism and the group's reaction to our practice of it:

”But I am no less sensitive and sympathetic to those who find it disconcerting or uncomfortable. I really am very sorry about that, but I also think the criticalist approach is easily mistaken for antagonism for its own sake, or pedantry run amuck. It is none of that. I urge you and others to give us the benefit of the doubt here, and to listen only to what we are saying and not to what you think we might otherwise be doing.

I also urge you to be more critical yourself (selves) in what you hear from us and from others who are critical of our approach. Over the past few days, for example, we weathered much criticism that in fact consisted mostly of sweeping generalizations about our style of inquiry and debate, with virtually no substance or evidence behind it. Here’s the pattern that often unfolds; watch for it: (1) Mark and/or Joe critique an idea and offer their own in response, (2) some back and forth follows, (3) some brave soul finally comes out and condemns us for our style of criticism and heaps sweeping generalizations upon us, (4) we respond with a request for examples of the crimes we have been accused of (“semantic attacks,” etc.), (5) we patiently wait for a response, and (6) no such examples come forward.

Thus, what we have here is really not so much a dispute over the substance of our ideas, but with the substance of our style instead. It’s as if the mark of a successful list serv has less to do with the quality of the knowledge we produce and share than with whether or not we approve of each others’ style of discourse and tolerate a kind of ‘nobody’s ever wrong and everybody’s right’ ethic. I really am very sorry to say, however, that some claims are just simply false, and we do ourselves, one and all, a profound disservice by carrying on as though they weren’t. And to interpret every disclosure of falsity as a personal attack is to cripple the learning enterprise. How can we possibly improve the quality of our knowledge if every revelation of falsity is greeted with hostility in response?

And so I think in critiquing the criticalist attitude as a basis for discourse in a list serv like this, such critics ought to be held to account for the alternative they would have us all embrace. Let us practice what we preach here, right now. As knowledge managers, what epistemology, if not criticalism, should we be practicing amongst ourselves as we engage in knowledge processing on this list? For those of you who reject criticalism, what alternative would you have us embrace, and why should we do so?"

Bill Hall then responded (04/26/04) to Mark's post discussing his work on Maturana and Varela's theory and the relationship of their work to Popper's and to the correspondence theory of truth. Bill explained that acceptance of Maturana and Varela's views on the construction of reality by organisms, is not inconsistent with acceptance of Popper's views on correspondence. Bill's post was followed by my own response to David's post, which explained the closeness of approach of our views and his. David then responded to Mark, with more clarification of views on Maturana and Varela. He also expressed his view that he finds my work and Mark's useful for innovation, because it focuses on self-generated barriers that may get in the way, but not on learning, because it doesn't work for him when he has to "understand events as they are unfolding."

I responded (04/26/04) to David Hawthorne's answer to Mark by explaining more of the perspective underlying our work and by showing that these perspectives were very close to his own. My primary emphasis was to show that many of our assumptions were constructivist in character, but that these did not preclude a correspondence epistemology and a criticalist theory of evaluation. David responded quickly on the same day, thanked me for my post, and continued to take issue with the idea that the search for true knowledge claims should be the regulative ideal in problem solving. His post proceeded to express his idea that criticalism was not adequate to deal with the dynamics of problem solving and creativity. I responded, late on the same day, by noting that the regulative ideal of truth as the goal of problem-solving was a motivator, and that that was its value. I also responded to the idea that criticalism was opposed to creativity by pointing out where it was useful in problem solving and referring David to my blog post entitled "All Life is problem Solving".

Mark responded to David as well, early on April 27th. He addressed David's claim that our work did not deal with the role of emergence in KM at some length. Mark indicated that from its beginning our work had been based in the theory of complexity and emergence, and he made reference to his web site, the Policy Synchronization Method (PSM), which is based on ideas of self-organization, and emergence, and our research. In brief, Mark documented that emergence "is one of the areas of work where we have perhaps gone further than anyone else in KM."

Fred Nickols continued posting on April 27th with the query:

"Last time I checked, the only way we know anything is by way of our senses. How is that reason and rationality are separate from our senses?"

Mark McElroy responded to Fred's post (04/27/04) by pointing out that we "sense with our senses" but we cannot know with them. To know we need to bring reason to bear to criticize and see whether what our senses are telling us is true.

Finally, I responded to Bill Hall's post of the day before on Maturana/Varela, Popper, and his own work integrating various streams of research. I supported Bill's views and related them to KMCI work and to other literature. I also pointed out that Maturana and Varela were constructivists rather than realists and that it was possible for people to both accept autopoiesis in living systems and to differ on epistemology.

The End for the Time Being

My post of April 27th ended the series of posts on theory. It had begun nearly a month before, in a discussion of Knowledge Management training, and ended in discussions of epistemology and their importance for KM. Many good exchanges had occurred during that time in the sense that posters had developed a much better understanding of the views of others. Many participants, according to their own statements, seemed to come close to agreement on some matters. And many others continued to disagree.

During the first period of exchange until April 20th, very little angst was publically expressed in the exchanges and personal attacks were minimal. But, evidently, a sense of frustration with the theory exchanges and the criticalist style of exchange, employing close logical analysis, practiced by Mark and I was building. Stuart Kay gave voice to that frustration in his post of April 20th. That post did not involve personal attacks, but a later post of his included a severe personal attack, and this was preceded by one by Robert Perey, and followed by others by Sylvia Marshall, and Paul James. Even David Hawthorne offered a post predominantly devoted to labeling the views of Mark and I. The conflicts with Stuart and David were worked out through continued exchange. In Stuart's case these were off-line exchanges with me. In David's they were online exchanges involving Mark, Bill Hall, David, and myself. Differences with many other members of the group: e.g., Robert Perey, Paul James, Sylvia Marshall, and Greg Timbrell, did not proceed to a conclusion, but would surface once again in May.

One of the primary questions raised by this period of interaction within act-km, is why posts by Mark and I created the angst they did among some members of the group? My posts were largely devoid of personal attacks and Mark's had remarkably few such expressions considering the volume of his posts. So what caused the problem? Given the posts of Greg Timbrell, Paul McDowell, other protesters and the off-line communications I received from Stuart Kay, I think the explanation lies in conflicting norms and practice, rather than in the subject matter of these posts, or in whether Mark or I were polite or not relative to a formal standard such as restricting our criticisms to views rather than people.

The practice that has developed in the act-km group over time is one of friendly exchange marked by no more than occasional and mildly critical comments on the views of others. In fact, the view had developed among many that there are many differing equally valid approaches to KM, and that it was wrong to claim that there was one absolute truth. Apparently the routine practice of exchange in act-km is a reflection of relativism, a form of justificationism that denies an objective external reality or criterion for truth, and regards all truth and certainty as personal, local, and ‘relative’ to an individual – i.e., anti-foundationalist, but not anti-justificationist. On the other hand, the practice of close and rigorous examination of people's messages and criticism of the logic of these messages is a new form of practice introduced into the group by Mark and I.

It is a practice that evidently threatens some participants, bores others, and introduces inconvenience for others who have to make their way through digests that are suddenly lengthy and hard to manage. The new practice angers these participants. From their point of view it does not bring important benefits, and it introduces the heavy cost of visible conflict into the group. They don't want to see it continue, and they don't think they need to tolerate it. So they move to sanction it. They do so by delivering messages using personal attacks, labeling, and ad hominems on-line, and by asking the moderator of the group to take action to bar those who wish to introduce the practices they oppose.

During April, the evidences of political communitarianism were not as visible, as they had been in December. The moderator did not get involved beyond his failure to moderate the personal attacks delivered by those frustrated by the new practices, which after all were themselves no more than the right of exercise of free and civil speech within the group. Stuart Kay's "Cat Among the Pigeons" post was not quite the call to arms that Serena Joyner's "Drowning Out the Little Voices" had been. Nevertheless, it was effective enough to call forth a considerable expression of disapproval of the new practice of close critical examination of posts. It also encouraged those in the group who thought that social sanctioning of the members introducing the new practices might be successful at some point in the future. We will see in future blog posts, that those who may have thought this way were quite right. It was only a matter of time until the opportunity to exercise community authority to remove the offending practices would present itself.

Postscript

Poverty -- Troubled Participation: Part One

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 04:20:12 GMT

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM --

Troubled Participation: Part One

In my last post I analyzed the history of an incident in the act-km group from both political and epistemological perspectives. I concluded that during December of 2003, the act-km group was characterized by political communitarianism, but I also found that there was insufficient evidence in the record to conclude that epistemological communitarianism applied to the group as well. In my next two blog posts, I'll pick up the story of act-km in January of 2004 and cover the time period through the end of April 2004.

Back to Normal Peace and Quiet

After the intense period of exchange on theoretical subjects, the act-km group participants settled into a variety of friendly, civil exchanges on such practice-focused topics as: Review of Projects and Lessons Learned, XK Extreme Knowledge, Prioritization of Knowledge Initiatives, Dear Sheep's Brother (an exchange on language and its relationship to culture), Query on Classification Schemes for Knowledge Retrieval, and Risk Mitigation and KM. Except for occasional informational contributions neither Mark, Dave Snowden, nor myself were involved. Critical discussions about framework or theory differences were relatively sparse. Of the three of us, Mark was most active, posting on the Prioritization, and KM and Risk Mitigation threads and making a few announcements.

Increasing Participation on Theoretical Issues

The next exchange that began to show increasing participation on theoretical issues began with a thread on Managing KM --Training, which appeared towards the end of March. The thread began when Greg Timbrell asked whether "in KM are we managing projects, programs, or endeavours?" Alice MacGillvray (03/31/04) answered with a post saying "I think the answer depends on two things: how you define knowledge management and where you sit in the process." Alice went on to discuss Mark McElroy's definition of KM and also spoke of a broader approach in which she gave examples of KM in relation to all three categories. Mark McElroy then responded (03/31/04) with a clarification of what he meant by KM and an endorsement of Alice's view. Greg (04/04/04) then responded with the idea that KM has elements in it that go beyond Project Management, stated his view that it required Program Management and "resource, cultural, and process control" capability. Mark responded (04/05/04) by agreeing with Greg and by asking him what he thought that KM should be doing, and what he thought the goal of KM that underlies its program should be.

Greg (04/06/04) replied by complimenting Mark on his "simple and powerful" questions and by providing answers to both questions with the following statement.

"I believe that KM is about using a knowledge perspective to maximise the use of firm resources and improve business processes and relationships in alignment with corporate goals."

Mark then responded (04/07/04) by disagreeing with Greg about KM's purpose of aligning with corporate goals and offering the theory that KM should "instead, worry about enhancing the quality of learning, innovation, and problem solving independent of our strategies du jour." This response of Mark's was followed by extensive and vigorous theoretical discussion of the issue of whether KM should be aligned with corporate goals and/or strategies. Greg (04/08/04), Rachel Baker (04/11/04) Dave Snowden (04/12/04), Warwick Holder (04/12/04), Paul James (04/14/04), Christie Mason (04/15/04), and Mark (various replies), all contributed to a very civil discussion.

On 04/14/04, Dave Snowden responded to Mark again with a strong but civil disagreement with Mark's view and Mark responded in kind on the same day. But his response contained the first statement in the exchanges that may be viewed as a personal attack, when after asking Dave whether he believed something he followed with: "Are you that much of an authoritarian?"

I then provided (04/15/04) my first post on this subject. That post was a close analysis of Dave's post of 04/14, primarily claiming that it did not address many of the questions Mark had raised. I also responded to Christie's post addressing the question of how you address the question of the impact of KM without connecting to management's strategy or goals. Larry Langman then (04/15/4) posted to try to clarify Mark's view further with an example. Mark did not respond quickly. His next post emphasized "the strategy exception error" and the Governance-based approach to KM by way of further response to Paul James's intervention.

The Buildup to Angst

The posts following Mark's response were from others commenting on his views. Paul McDowell (04/15/04) expressed the view that KM should be part of all aspects of management and then (04/16/04) asked whether organizations were using Mark's paradigm of KM. Patrick Lambe (04/15/04) criticized Mark for the negative personal comment reflected in the question he asked Dave, and then went on to say that:

". . . alignment can also mean that two things are managed into a workable relationship without either forcing the other to its purpose (Strategy compelling KM or KM compelling Strategy). So it would be perfectly possible in thinking of those situations to see KM and Strategy as convergent and complementary processes."

Patrick also questioned (message 3382, 04/19/04) my post of the 15th, asking whether I was pursuing the topic of discussion or Dave Snowden. In reply, (04/19/04), I responded by asking him whether he thought that Dave's lack of responsiveness to Mark's criticisms was relevant to whether Dave's view that Mark's conclusion is wrong should be given credence or not?

Fred Nickols (04/16/04) asked whether Mark's view implied that the CEO was subordinate to KM through the Board, and whether, in this view, some of the organizational management burden would not be shifted from the CEO to the CKO. He also asked, in a separate post on the same day, whether KM was a knowledge claim, and, if so, why is it more scared than strategy. I replied to that by saying (04/19/04) that KM was not a knowledge claim, but that statements about it were, and were no more sacred than strategy claims. Jeff Popova-Clark (04/19/04) expressed the view that the approach to KM was a matter of perspective, and that one could certainly look at KM from many differing perspectives including a Governance perspective.

Mark McElroy then began to post responses to the various comments on his posts. On April 19th, Mark answered Paul McDowell's question on whether any organizations used a Governance-based approach to KM. He answered Fred Nickols's questions about knowledge claims, whether the CEO is subordinate to the CKO, and whether there is a shifting of the Management burden in the Governance-based approach. He next replied to Larry Langman's analogy and said it was a good one. He followed that reply with an extensive answer to Patrick Lambe's post of the 15th, but here he did not acknowledge the personal overtones in his question to Snowden, and also made reference and even used the word "totalitarianism" in connection with views that suggest that learning should be constrained to activities that support management.

Patrick Lambe then followed with three more posts on the 19th. He agreed with Jeff Popova-Clark's post. He replied to one of Mark's posts. He responded to Mark's citation of examples of the Governance-based approach by suggesting that the US Government might be currently providing an example of such an organization. Finally, he posted a message saying that he meant no negative overtones in his previous post, but that he thought that ideas stand or fall by who believes in them.

Mark answered Patrick on the 20th, pointing out that the idea that knowledge stands or falls based on who believes it may be true, but that it is arguably irresponsible to say so because it encourages appeals to authority in evaluating knowledge -- an ad hominem argument. He also characterized Jeff Popova-Clark's position as relativistic without explaining why -- a use of labeling in discourse. Jeff replied making a number of interesting points, including that he, like Mark, was a realist, but that he believed in the need for multiple reference frames in viewing multi-dimensional truth. Mark then responded briefly and personably to Patrick's post about the US government.

The Expression of Angst and the Temporary Denouement

Up to this point, a very extensive exchange had taken place between Mark and various correspondents including myself over a period of three weeks. Most posts were devoid of personal attacks, labeling, or ad hominem arguments, with the exception of a handful from Mark. Many very high quality posts (in my view) resulted from these exchanges and the discussion became fairly deep on certain aspects of the issue of Management vs. Governance-based KM. The next post (04/20/04) was from Stuart Kay. It was entitled "Cat Among the Pigeons", and it contained a fairly extensive statement of a relativistic position including a lengthy quote from Ronald Dworkin, a noted legal philosopher supporting relativism. The essence of Stuart Kay's view was expressed in his statement:

". . . I find all practical and theoretical posts to this list useful, but not the claims - explicit or implicit - of authors that their views are better or more correct."

That is, Stuart's view implies that competitive knowledge claim evaluation, using close logical analysis is not a useful activity. Stuart's post shortly was reinforced by Sylvia Marshall who did not explicitly state support for the position of relativism, but viewed Stuart's post as an attack on the "dramatics" and "the grand-standing" of unnamed posters. Patrick Lambe also supported Stuart's view. I quickly responded to Stuart's post by providing a very detailed analysis of it with the objective of showing that the relativistic position taken by both Stuart, and Dworkin was wholly without merit. My response, though very direct and critical, was not personal or ad hominem. It did however use the very logical style that Stuart had implicitly criticized. Mark McElroy also responded on (04/21/04) to Stuart's post, in a lighter vein, but again in a manner that avoided personal attacks.

Robert Perey responded (04/21/04) to my post with both extreme brevity and incivility, saying simply: "Frig me!!!" I never answered his post. Stuart responded (04/21/04) to Mark and I with another lengthy post. The first part of it was a serious effort to engage with our point of view by critiquing a graphic white paper on epistemology we had previously cited. But about one-third of the way through his very long post, Stuart gave way to the most extensive expression of personal attacks, labeling and ad hominem argument yet seen in the group. Mark answered Stuart's post on 04/22/04, by taking his substantive arguments and replying to them in detail. He then responded to Stuart's attack on our style by pointing out that it was neither substantive nor based in a close analysis of what we said. Mark did not respond in kind to Stuart's personal attacks, but was very measured in his lengthy response. David Hawthorne responded to Mark with a post that involved an interpretive characterization of our views. Though his post was very well-written and much lighter in tone than Stuart's, and though it contained one substantive criticism about the views we expressed toward risk, It was, for the most part, every bit as much an exercise in labeling as Stuart's post.

I responded (04/22/04) to Stuart's post with another lengthy analysis. I treated his post seriously and did not reply to his attacks in kind. Stuart responded to my post by taking our exchange off-line. We then exchanged views over the next day and-a-half until we developed a good mutual understanding and came to a stopping place. Later, on the 24th, Stuart had occasion to write me again to comment on a response I'd made to someone else. This time we corresponded until the 27th, and again ended our correspondence after coming to a good mutual understanding.

Meanwhile, Greg Timbrell contributed a post (04/22/04), part of which, contained "a comment on our list culture". The comment pointed out that the views expressed in the list were written in spare time, not meant to be perfect, informal, and hence always "provide opportunities for criticism." Greg then suggested we needed to remain balanced in criticism and to refrain from long, detailed and often boring examinations of every point made by a poster. Greg also pointed out that others may experience "angst" and may not contribute because they fear too close an analysis of their posts. In other words, Greg was saying that close logical analysis of the views expressed in the act-km community is in conflict with its norms.

I'll continue the story of the period of troubled participation in act-km in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty -- Incident One: Part Two

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 02:09:15 GMT

Fisherman at Sea (J. W. M. Turner, 1796)

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Incident One: Part Two

This post picks up my analysis of the first incident in the act-km group with an analysis of the communitarian response.

Communitarian Response

As I've indicated above, there was always some level of disapproval for the exchanges over theory using detailed logical analysis, that were occurring in the group. Serena Joyner's post on 11/27/03 made clear her distaste for overly long posts and personal attacks, a description that certainly fit some of the theory posts. On 12/08/03 there were 5 posts expressing discomfort over the strong disagreements and personal tone being expressed in the theory posts. These ended with Sylvia Marshall's attempt to bring these posts to an end by "shushing" both Dave and Mark. Alongside these negative expressions there were some messages expressing positive support of the value of the theory posts for learning. Mark Schenk's comment on 12/10/03 reflected some of this positive view, but he also said: "We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner." In this way, he expressed his view that he had to ensure that people were not too uncomfortable over what was going on.

On 12/16/03, the community erupted against the theory discussions. Serena Joyner led the way with post 3011 entitled "Drowning out the little Voices." This, ingeniously titled post described her "feeling a little swamped . . . drowned out by this incessant, highly theoretical, "your camp - our camp" style discussion". She also said:

"I support debate - I dislike long-winded, highly theoretical debate when it is repeated again and again. Make your case and move on! The battle won't be won here." (Emphasis added)

Serena Joyner's "little voice", which betrayed an assumption that differences of opinion in the group could not be resolved through critical discussion and logical analysis, was echoed by a chorus of 12 other "little voices", all posting on 12/16/03. There were a few posts that balanced positive and negative evaluations in their comments and four that supported the theory discussions. The favorable posts arrived later on the 16th, however, and the most favorable, not until the 18th. That post (message 3063) from David Hawthorne said:

"What happened in the McElroy/Firestone, Snowden debate? Everything that should have happened! No votes of closure, please. I found the exchanges illuminating even when they made me feel a bit uncomfortable. That's the way it's supposed to work. If I wanted to engage in shushing, I'd go back to the church I grew up in where there was no shortage of people with a penchant for enforcing their personal conceptions of permissible discourse. I liked the fire and fury and I liked how "the little voices" were provoked to action. I liked the denouement --the efforts at graceful extrication and the reluctant loosening of grasped lapels. My advice, let it roll. Go on and act out, and act up, or risk taking the "act" out of KM."(emphasis added)

Mark Schenk's reaction to the outpouring of negative sentiment was swift. He posted a note on 12/16/03, initiating a thread on "lessons learned from the debate". In his note he mentioned three lessons: (1) cooperation is better than the competition he saw during the period of the theory exchanges, (2) self-moderation -- did it work, should it be continued? (3) How about a cooperative effort to identify the points of agreement within the group? And he said:

"I think a list of concepts or principles that we agree on is much more valuable than tedious debate over issues that make me wonder if we can't see the wood for the trees." (emphasis added)

Basically, Schenk's post was a public effort to bring the community together and to moderate negative reactions. It was not focused on making knowledge, but on integrating the community, and it also implied a lack of faith in the ability of logical analysis to help in problem solving. Behind the scenes, Mark Schenk also took the following steps. (A) He asked Dave, Mark, and I to discontinue our postings on the topics we had been exchanging on. (B) He refused to post a message of mine in answer to one of Dave's posts. He didn't do this due to any characteristic of my post specifically, and he acknowledged that my posts were the most civil among the three of us, but simply because he felt he had to discontinue our exchange. In his words:

"But, at the end of the day, this discussion has deteriorated to the point where intervention was necessary for the continued health of the group (my assessment, for which I am accountable)." (emphasis added)

(C) Mark also blocked a second post of mine. This one answered "the little voices" posts. It quoted the passage from message 2975 I used earlier in this blog post, and pointed out "Now as far as I can see, this point has not even been the subject of discussion, much less refutation, by any voices, little or otherwise."

Mark objected to the tone of my note, specifically to its subject line which was: "Re: The Chorus of Little Voices" and to the salutation: "Dear Little Voices". He characterized my note as "condescending" because I used the same identifier to describe "the little voices" as they used to legitimize themselves. I agreed to revise the note and changed the subject to "Posts that criticize and theorize", and the salutation to "Everyone". It ended it with:

"Now as far as I can see, this point has not even been the subject of discussion, much less refutation, by anyone. So why should the moderator put a stop to posts that theorize and criticize?"

In spite of my revision, Mark Schenk never posted my response to those "little voices". In doing this he illustrated his own belief in the idea that posts that criticize and theorize are not very effective in making contributions to the community. In contrast, Mark let Dave Snowden's and Mark McElroy's responses through. Dave used his opportunity to renew his personal attacks, ad hominems, and labeling activities and to avoid substantive arguments (see message 3022). He even referred to unnamed "amateur philosophers" in his post, a labeling exercise that Mark saw fit to comment on in his response in message 3040. But most of Mark's final message was devoted to a heartfelt statement of disappointment over the negative reaction of so many in the group to honest theoretical exchange; and to the effort to seriously discuss the scope of KM, and difficulties with a framework (ASHEN) that some in the group were already using.

Communitarianism or Something Else?

Before reaching a conclusion on whether or not communitarianism was at play in act-km during incident 1, I think one needs to evaluate behavior and claims expressed in the group in the context of possibilities other than communitarianism. In the area of politics, I believe the alternative possibilities are (1) managerialism, the idea that sole legitimate authority resides in the group managers, and (2) constitutionalism, the idea that the authority of neither the managers nor the community can abridge certain individual rights of the participants, even though legitimate authority to manage day-to-day affairs may reside in either the managers, the community, or both. So which alternative fits incident 1 in act-km? Is constitutionalism, communitarianism, managerialism, or some possibility I've not been able to specify reflected in this incident.

Obviously I leave the last possibility of incompleteness in my typology for others to specify. Moving to constitutionalism, Act-km has no "constitution" written or unwritten, that guarantees the right of free expression on substance to each individual member. In fact, individual members have no rights, only privileges to post to the group. Dave Snowden, Mark, and I were required to stop posting on the threads we were discussing in accordance with the administrative decision of Mark Schenk, based on his view that continued postings by us were endangering the "continued health of the group". Our privilege to post on those threads was removed. That could not have happened in a group with a constitutional right of free expression.

Was act-km reflecting managerialism in this incident? I don't think so. Of course, in all yahoo groups, "the owners" have the formal authority to specify what the rules of the game of interaction will be, and therefore act-km could morph into a managerialism-based group at any time by fiat. However, the managers of act-km appear to view themselves as serving and representing the members, and view their job as expressing the will of the members and facilitating its direct expression. Therefore they look to members' self moderation, and to the expressions of members for guidance, and don't believe that they have the right to do anything that would oppose the consensus of the group. Faced with the choice of imposing decisions against the will of the group or resigning, I think that the managers of act-km would resign their leadership rather than do anything they believed the community was against.

Was political communitarianism at play in act-km during the incident? I think it was. In the events I've recorded above, there is no evidence of constitutionalism. Moreover, Mark Schenk's note of caution on 12/10/03 doesn't appear until after a number of expressions of concern about the conflicts expressed in the theory posts had occurred. And his post on learning from the debates doesn't appear until after most of the "little voices" posts have appeared on the 16th.

It is ironic that Mark, in post 2973, says: "We have almost always let the group self-moderate in the interests of freedom of expression . . . ", because "self-moderate" has more than one meaning. It can mean that the individual self-moderates her own posts, or that the community self-moderates through the social sanctions it imposes or attempts to impose on its individual members. In the above record, the moderators in act-km enabled individual members to express (and with a fair amount of rudeness, in my view) their desire for other individual members to cease posting simply because they did not like the theory posts. The moderators relied on these expressions in hopes that they would "moderate" the theory posts. When the theory posters continued to express themselves, however, and the "self-moderation" escalated to a high level of intensity on 12/16 with the expressions of all "the little voices", Mark Schenk intervened to end the theory posts. Why did he do that?

I think the record indicates that it was not because theory posts were really so conflictful as all that. I've indicated above that there were some personal attacks, ad hominems, and instances of labeling in these posts. But they were relatively few, primarily restricted to exchanges between Dave Snowden and Mark McElroy, and could easily have been controlled by placing theory posters under moderation and requiring them to revise their posts to delete inflammatory remarks. His decision to stop the theory postings was, I believe, based on his view that the community consensus (expressed in "the little voices") was that they should not continue, and he felt that the health of the community was dependent on his acting in accordance with that expressed consensus.

But in allowing his perception of community consensus to provide the basis for his elimination of the theory posts, he violated the rights of Dave, Mark, and myself, in the name of the community and its continued health, as if we had "shouted 'fire' in a crowded theatre". But the act-km group is not a crowded theatre, and there is no reason to restrict the rights of individuals to express themselves for the sake of what the community wants, unless, of course, the moderator and many members of his community are political communitarians.

What about epistemological communitarianism? Is that at work in act-km? Based on the record of this first incident, I think the answer to that question is not clear. Certainly, during the period leading up to and encompassing the incident, there was no strong emphasis in the group on the importance of critical evaluation and testing in knowledge making, though a few members of the community were supportive of it. In fact, Mark Schenk's message on "learning from the debates" emphasizes both the importance of cooperation and the idea of coming up with a list of things everyone agrees with. He says nothing about the importance of critical testing and evaluation as a lesson to be learned from the debates. Nor do more than a few in the group in their various posts on theory, standards, tools or any other subjects. In addition certain posts critical of the theory exchanges exhibited impatience with the close logical analysis used in the theory posts.

This absence of concern with criticism, suggests that in the area of epistemology, the ideology of act-km may either be unformed as yet, or may be some form of justificationism, rather than criticalism. But which form of justificationism is present, or whether there is an emergent epistemology characteristic of act-km, is not clear from Incident One alone. In my next blog, I'll discuss the next period of troubled participation in the act-km group.

Postscript

Poverty -- Incident One: Part One

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 01:46:27 GMT

Earth Rising From Apollo 11

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Incident One: Part One

In my last two posts I've discussed conflict, rules, and learning in list servs, spent a good bit of time on communities of inquiry, and also advanced the conjecture that three popular KM list serv groups exhibit a commitment to political and epistemological communitarianism in their ideologies and moderation practices. I also promised to provide more detailed analysis of occurrences in the three groups to document the presence of communitarianism. This post, the first of many on this subject, and the first of nine on act-km covers part of the first incident in the act-km group.

Theory Posts

This incident began innocently enough with a question in message 2893, dated 11/23/03, requesting some quick ideas on the nature of a knowledge audit. There followed a vigorous discussion with a few disagreements expressing differing views on this subject. In message 2910, 11/25/03, Dave Snowden expressed his views on the subject relating his answer to his ASHEN framework. Others asked for clarification about ASHEN, and there followed a number of posts covering ASHEN and its possible role in audits. Matthew Tutaki (message 2924, 11/27/03) then posted a critical comment which, in addition to comments directed specifically at Dave Snowden's claims, also included an ad hominem argument on the role of vendors and on vendor motivation by way of casting doubt on Snowden's substantive views.

Snowden then replied, with a minimum of ad hominem, I thought, followed by a Tutaki comment beginning to break off the exchange. Serena Joyner then intervened with a post (#2929, 11/27/03) that spoke favorably about the value of exchange in the act-km group, Snowden's work, and also criticized posts that were overly long and contained personal attacks. She also criticized "those who may use the forum to push their particular barrow, particularly if it is ill-informed or not backed up with evidence. Look, it just gets boring!" Joyner finished her message with the admonition: "We have a fabulous arena for debate and knowledge creation - lets keep it so."

Following Joyner's post, a few more posts supporting ASHEN appeared, and then the original thread morphed into a new one called ASHEN and Relationships. This thread introduced a bit of debate about whether it was useful to collapse ASHEN categories. Then, in message 2946, on 12/07/03, Mark McElroy raised the question of whether ASHEN makes a clear distinction between information and knowledge.

McElroy's post contained no ad hominems, personal attacks, or labeling of ASHEN or its main author, Dave Snowden. Snowden replied (in message 2950, 12/0703) with an account of how he uses ASHEN, attempting to show that the way he uses it does not require a clear distinction between Information and Knowledge. For the most part, his response avoided personal or ad hominem attacks and labeling, but at one point he implied that he, presumably, in comparison to others, does not play word games and he also provided the following gratuitous comment.

"I don't really want to get sucked into the beliefs and claims issue that seems to be an obsession of the latest KMCI method, I thing is a misreading of Popper but accepted long ago that we were no going to agree on this!"

This statement is not related to the substantive argument, but is a reference with a pejorative tone that labels the KMCI perspective as obsessive and negatively evaluates its interpretation and use of Popper's epistemology without explaining its negative evaluation.

Mark McElroy (in 2951, 12/07/03) replied almost immediately with a comment that answered Snowden's critique and largely avoided anything personal. At one point however, McElroy used sarcasm to get a point across saying:

". . . And though I do not profess to have access to the truth, much less feel that anyone can know it with certainty, I do not feel this warrants the abandonment of its pursuit as a regulative ideal. If you disagree, what shall we call your brand of KM, Knowledge [as if it matters] Management?"

In message 2953, 12/08/03, Snowden delivered a response which avoided personal attack, with the exception of some labeling to the effect that McElroy made a terrible number of assumptions in his post, until the very last paragraph. There he criticized a presentation on epistemology by myself and McElroy, by using an ad hominem and a very personal attack in relation to KMCI's promotional use of an evaluation of the content of a joint presentation by Mark and myself at the KM Global Exchange conference a couple of years ago. It is not clear, how his point, namely, that a fact can lead one to a conclusion that is different than one might arrive at if one had a more complete set of facts, is connected either to our epistemology presentation, or to the previous posts exchanged between the two concerning the ASHEN model.

At that point, Kate Andrews intervened (message 2954, 12/08/03) saying: "I wonder if others share discomfort that for a 'no one-right-way' discipline we seem to spend much time in this forum defending to the death our own 'one-right-way' of seeing the KM landscape." Kate's was the first of five posts that day criticizing either the theoretical discussions, the ego involvement of the people contributing to them, their complex language, or their "boring" character. This was punctuated by McElroy's reply to Snowden (message 2960, 12/08/03). It included two instances of labeling:

"Where does your uncritical pandering to the powers that be and their strategies end, and why should the rest of us in KM subscribe to it?" And:

"Well I guess that’s a pretty cynical and condescending point of view. I try to tell the truth when asked to, don’t you?"

Mark's post was followed by a few that expressed concern about the hostile exchanges that were occurring. One post focused on substance and compared the McElroy and Snowden points of view. Another post by Snowden said that he was ending the discussion, but insisted on the validity of his personal attack. And finally a message (2968, 12/08/03) by Sylvia Marshall that asked both Dave and Mark to take their argument off-line ("The rest of us don't want to know"). In message 2969, 12/09/03, Mark responded to Snowden by summarizing his case and pointing out that Dave had failed to answer any of his questions. He also addressed the increasing expressions of angst in the group about the exchanges over theory saying:

"To the others on this list, I know that some of you do not want to see or participate in this thread any longer. For those that do (as some of you have indicated), I will be happy to go along. Others can just hit the delete button, I guess. Let’s see what happens. After all, this is an open community, isn’t it?" (emphasis added)

Mark's post was followed by one reflecting positively on the debate, and then by a post by Bill Hall (message 2972, 12/09/03) advancing the idea that the conflict of views among McElroy, Snowden, and myself (though I had yet to post anything to the group), was due to paradigm incommensurabilities. Bill also commented on the strengths of both approaches and his areas of disagreement.

At this point, Mark Schenk, the moderator of act-km, thought (message 2973, 12/10/03) it was time for him to comment on the past few weeks of interaction. His post celebrated diversity, and then made the following comment:

"Secondly, the passion of the debate is undeniable, indicating people who care deeply about the subject matter. The willingness to share so openly is fantastic, and it creates a great learning opportunity. We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner." (emphasis added)

He then followed with a statement of his commitment to self-moderation for the group and a request that posters observe group netiquette, which he summarized, while referring readers to a posted file for the full version. Mark Schenk's post was the first expression of moderator concern about conflict exhibited in the exchanges.

After Mark Schenk's intervention, the first two of my posts to the list serv appeared. The first (message 2974, 12/10/03) was a comment on Bill Hall's post pointing out that there were direct logical conflicts between my views and Dave Snowden's and not just incommensurabilities. The second (message 2975, 12/10/03) entered the debate between Mark McElroy and Dave. It made the point of the importance of the distinction between knowledge and information even more strongly and then addressed the meta-debate about whether the thread on ASHEN should end with these words:

"Again, I'd like to put this point more directly, if I might. The calls from various people to end this thread, are calls to stop other members of the group from posting civil messages designed to further the group's process of inquiry. These calls are requests to "block the way of inquiry" to quote Charles Sanders Peirce. To the extent such calls are successful, or even thought to be legitimate, they stand in the way of critical examination of conflicting points of view concerning the ASHEN Model. They therefore harm our collective efforts to increase our knowledge about it, since we can only learn about the quality of our knowledge claims by seeing whether they survive the criticisms and other tests they face. (emphasis added)

Since fostering inquiry must be among the chief purposes of a community devoted to KM practice, such communities ought to be tolerant to a fault about such exchanges. They should not be anxious to smooth them over in the interests of a harmony that ends such interactions prematurely, or in the interests of escaping boredom. In the end, what harm is there to members in getting posts that explore deeply issues they are not interested in? No one has to read such posts and all are free to begin other threads that they are interested in. So why enforce a community view of what should be discussed on even a small minority, and risk losing the chance that something someone says in the throes of dialog may be very significant for the group as a whole?"

The material in both these posts was entirely substantive. There were no ad hominems, personal attacks, or labels used in them.

Mark McElroy followed my post with one (message 2976, 12/10/03) responding to a post of David Hawthorne's arguing against the idea that one needs truth as a regulative ideal for knowledge production. Mark's post was entirely civil, substantive, and courteous, as was David's response in message 2977, 12/10/03. Dave Snowden (message 2978, 12/10/03) and Mark McElroy (message 2980, 12/10/03) then exchanged posts. Both were polite. Mark's post avoided personal attacks. Snowden's post repeated his labeling of Popper's views as "narrow" and the interpretation of his views by Mark and I as a narrow construal of Popper without explaining his reasons for these characterizations. He also softened but still sought to justify and excuse his attack on Mark relating to KMCI's promotion of the evaluation of its conference presentation. Mark then addressed (message 2982, 12/10/03) Bill Hall's previous characterization of KM in another very substantive post without personal attacks, ad hominems or labeling. Bill did not respond to this post, but I responded (message 2990, 12/13/03) with a commentary on the nature of KM and the priority of KM over strategy. Once again, there was nothing personal in the style of this post and no response from Bill was forthcoming.

During the time the ASHEN thread was slowing down, it began to "spin off" other exchanges. First, Robert Perey (message 2993, 12/14/03) took issue with Mark McElroy on the idea of "truth" and advocated a concept of degrees of truth applying fuzzy logic. Mark (message 2997, Shawn Callahan (message, 3002) and I (message 2999), all commented, with Shawn supporting Robert, and Mark and I critiquing his views. No personal comments or labeling occurred during these exchanges.

Second, Mathew Tutaki, Amanda Horne, Dave Snowden, Gray Southon, David Rymer, Mark McElroy, James Dellow, and I began to exchange views on KM Standards. These posts (2985, 2986, 2989, 2991, 2992, 2995, 2996, 3000, 3007, 3008, and 3009) all avoided personalizing issues. In message 3003, 12/14/03, during a discussion of the idea introduced by Dave that "Ontology precedes Epistemology", however, I offered an ad hominem argument to suggest that this idea needed to be looked at carefully against its competitors. But I also carefully identified the ad hominem, and did not claim it as a reason for thinking that the idea was false. Nor did I use the ad hominem to personally attack Dave Snowden. Rather, I used it as a reason to avoid hasty adoption of the "Ontology precedes Epistemology" notion without critically evaluating it against alternatives.

Third, a thread also started on Technology as a Tool. This thread involved Greg Timbrell, James Dellow and myself in posts 2994, 3004, 3005, and 3010. All exchanges avoided personal comments and were highly substantive.

I'll continue with Part Two of Incident One in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty of Communitarianism

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 21:08:19 GMT

Expulsion From the Garden of Eden

(Thomas Cole, 1828)

The Poverty of Communitarianism

Communitarianism harkens back to methods of knowledge production and decision making in traditional closed societies, where decision making in both knowledge and social processing relied heavily on community consensus and on cultural traditions that are strongly supported and reinforced by an organic tightly knit community. I'll distinguish two types of Communitarianism: epistemological and political.

Epistemological Communitarianism

Epistemological Communitarianism includes a theory of knowledge claim evaluation which makes an appeal to a consensus or community-held view as a basis for justifying knowledge claims as true and certain, or, more recently, as probable, or at least, acceptable. It is often associated with Thomas Kuhn’s characterization of ‘paradigms’ and the views of the prevailing scientific community upon which they rest. Today, it is also often associated with fallibilism, and with any of a number of theories of knowledge including: realism. coherentism, instrumentalism, pragmatism, and relativism.

There are other theories of knowledge claim evaluation, apart from epistemological communitarianism, that involve attempts to justify knowledge claims in terms of some foundation. These include: Expertise-based, paradigm-based, and managerial-based justificationisms. Each is dominant in its sphere. Epistemological communitarianism, however, is the form of justificationism that is most frequently seen in peer-based groups such as communities of practice.

The poverty of epistemological communitarianism is due to its justificationism, the idea that knowledge claims must be justified and established relative to some foundation of unquestioned statements. Justificationism is false, because no statement can be justified, nor does it need to be, in order to be considered knowledge. Nor is it true that knowledge claims which have the consensus support of some professional community are true. So justificationism, including epistemological communitarianism, doesn't just lead to impoverished results: it leads to holding basic ideas beyond questioning and test. It closes off the possibility of change in these ideas and thus restricts the range of adaptations and co-evolution available to us in the face of environmental change.

The alternative to justificationism is criticalism, the idea that adds to fallibilism the notion that we are rational only to the extent that we hold our knowledge claims open to continuous criticism and testing in order to eliminate the errors in them. Criticalism, like justificationism represents a general category of theories of evaluation. Just as epistemological communitarianism is a type of justificationism, critical rationalism, comprehensively critical rationalism, critical coherentism, and critical scientific realism are types of criticalism. I'll wait for future blog posts to explain the distinctions among these, but you can learn more about most of these distinctions from a graphic white paper written by Mark McElroy and myself called "Corporate Epistemology".

Political Communitarianism

Thus, political communitarianism, like Greek Democracy and Rousseau's popular democracy, is not a constitutional political system. Its poverty is due to its failure to protect the rights of individual participants against "the general will" of the community. It does not constrain the emergence of tyranny and specifically the expression of community-based authoritarianism in decision making affecting the rights of individual members. From the viewpoint of adaptation, it restricts membership in the system to those who accept the consensus norms, and thereby, ceteris paribus, it restricts the adaptive range of the community, because it restricts the variety of opinions, ideas, and creative expressions available to it in distributed problem solving. Political communitarianism then, is poor in freedom, and in its capability to adapt.

Epistemological and Political Communitarianism

Epistemological and political communitarianism are logically independent, but also frequently correlated. When both are present, they reinforce one another, and a stable communitarian system. When neither are present, communitarianism is absent. When epistemological communitarianism is present and political communitarianism is absent, epistemological communitarianism may still be quite stable, because it may be quite compatible with alternative political forms other than constitutional regimes. Even with a constitutional, open political order however, epistemological communitarianism can still survive if members accept such philosophical doctrines as paradigms and their inescapable incommensurability, expert authority, social constructivism, and epistemological relativism. When political communitarianism is present and epistemological communitarianism is absent, there is great pressure placed on the knowledge processing system by the political order to move toward epistemological communitarianism, because failure to do so would suggest that the communitarian political order is illegitimate. In addition, the present world intellectual climate is fertile for epistemological communitarianism, given the spread of relativism, radical and social constructivism, and the "floating foundationalisms" of Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty, and Polanyi.

Communitarianism and Communities of Practice

An important issue in creating CoPs is whether they will evolve toward communitarianism or other types of political systems. Since participation in CoPs is voluntary, I believe there are only two stable forms of CoPs, communitarian and constitutional or open CoPs. The interesting question this raises is whether there are differences in generating conditions that enable one or another of these types (keeping firmly in mind that each of these CoP attractor states is an emergent that cannot be determined simply by its generating conditions)?

I think there are such conditions. They have to do, first, with the Ideology of the people forming the community. Ideology matters. If the people who form a community believe that no decisions are beyond the authority of the community's "general will" as expressed in community interaction, then it will be the case that the community's founders, who are often its elite, will not hesitate to express "the general will" without recognizing any constraints arising from individual rights. In other words, in communities, the ideology of its founders, if reflected in its initial rules and interactions, is likely to be carried over into its practice and into its developing norms and values. This is especially true because the natural (biological) pragmatism reflected in the reinforcement learning dynamics affecting all life is biased toward avoiding the short-term conflict accompanying dissent. Members in such communities are all too likely to accept that they are "apprentices" whose participation should be peripheral and non-disruptive for some time, and that learning in the CoP is about socialization into the community, rather than contributing to the recognition and solution of its problems.

In open CoPs, which are constitutional in character, the Ideology of those who form a community may be very different. To begin with, it is likely to view the CoP as an interactive group, that may or may become a community for some time, if ever. It also may view the CoP's purpose in terms of the primacy of member problem solving and inquiry and not in terms of the primacy of "negotiating meaning" and "creating community". Finally, it will view the community as built on the inalienable individual rights of its members to express any content on any issue related to the domain of the community; either by asserting a knowledge claim, or by criticizing one that has been asserted -- provided only that that expression is civil enough to moderate the conflict that is to be expected from inquiry possessing a vigorous and unremitting critical dimension. These Communities of Inquiry (CoIs), in contrast to Communitarian Communities (CCs) have no "apprentices," only contributors. Learning in them is about solving problems, not about "negotiating meaning". CoIs reduce the force of community social sanctions against individuals who express views dissenting from the community at large. One result is that the community can develop a higher tolerance for conflict and a more diverse membership. This, in turn, means, that this type of community is likely to have a wider range of adaptive possibilities in its tool box, and consequently a greater capacity to co-evolve with its environment than CCs.

Communitarianism and KM List Servs

KM List Servs are wedded to political communitarianism. I don't say that lightly, and certainly you won't hear most people in these list servs "'fess" up to it. But you can see it in the way many group members and group moderators act when people begin to vigorously express views that they disagree with, even when the expression of these views is polite, or at least far more polite than the responses from defenders of the community view.

Not only do the moderators of these e-mail-based CoPs bar future postings from those who express dissenting views persistently and vigorously, but before such action takes place they tolerate uncivil posts from those defending prevailing views. They also react strongly to any hint of incivility from those trying to develop the case for new perspectives. Members in such groups believe that there is nothing inappropriate about writing to moderators to urge action against those expressing views they don't agree with, or simply don't want to see expressed for whatever reason. And moderators think nothing of abandoning a level playing field by restricting the posting rights of the targets of those who ask for moderation, purely on the basis of the number of people who complain, and regardless of whether the behavior of those to be censored is civil, or if not entirely so, at least far less uncivil than many of those who are doing the complaining.

The dominant theory of knowledge claim evaluation in KM list serv groups is epistemological communitarianism. Knowledge is viewed as that which emerges from the practices of the group through its attempts to negotiate meaning. And it is assumed that the knowledge outcomes of meaning negotiations are justified by community interaction/negotiation processes producing community practices. This justificationism goes unremarked and unquestioned, as if there is no alternative basis for knowledge production other than epistemological communitarianism based on the community's situated negotiation of meaning.

I will document these views about KM list serv groups in future blog posts by describing recent occurrences in the comprac, act-km, and AOK-net yahoo groups, three groups in which I've acted as a participant observer. First, however, I want to consider the question of why these KM groups are communitarian in character.

Why Communitarianism?

Why should the three KM list serv groups all be communitarian in character? Groups outside of KM, for example, The Fabric of Reality, The Critical Café, The Critical Rationalist, and The Post-Popper Groups, all yahoo groups like the three KM groups, are anything but communitarian. There are rules in some of these groups, but others are not even under moderation. Sometimes moderators do intervene in Fabric of Reality when they think a discussion has become circular. But this is very rare and only occurs after very detailed exploration of questions. I have never seen participants in these groups complain to moderators about the posts of other participants. In the unmoderated groups, I have seen members bitterly complain to one another or to other participants about someone else. But I have never heard of anyone in these groups asking the moderator to stop someone from posting, or restrict their participation.

I think the explanation for communitarianism in the KM groups lies in KM itself, and specifically in the widespread popularity of the reigning theory of Communities of Practice developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, and others since the early 1990s. I think that it is from that theory that the moderators of the three groups, as well as their members, have adapted communitarian ideology, which easily becomes reflected in the practice of their list servs.

The moderators of all three KM Groups may fairly be said to revere Communities of Practice as one of the primary, or even the primary, advance introduced by KM. All are quite familiar with the CoP literature and with various stories about CoPs and their successes and failures as knowledge sharing tools. All seem to view themselves as servants and instruments of the list serv communities they serve, as obligated to reflect the consensus of the members, and as dedicated to preserving their communities and protecting them against excessive conflict caused by too vigorous interchange. All seem to believe that knowledge is "enacted" and negotiated in their communities, and that knowledge in these communities is what the members think it is, or what they practice. None seem to believe that any members have basic and inalienable individual rights of self-expression relating to their substantive views that cannot be limited by the community at large if it decides, as evidenced by behind the scenes complaints to the moderator, that it wishes to censor those expressions.

In these various groups, the moderators' outlooks are reinforced by many who actively seek censorship of "offending" parties and who reward the moderators with praise when they show "courage" by supporting popular sentiment rather than individual rights. Some members actually believe that people should keep their posts short so that these members can continue to enjoy the convenience of using e-mail digests instead of subscribing to individual e-mails, so that they may simply delete posts they do not wish to read. Thus, they oppose all lengthy discussions of issues, which, of course, means that they oppose all in-depth exploration of issues in the group. Still other members believe that knowledge is relative, and that in the context of CoPs it is relative to the community itself.

In short, the explanation for the occurrence of communitarianism in KM list servs lies in the influence of CoP theory, and in the ideologies of the moderators and members of these KM groups. The ideologies at issue encompass both political and epistemological communitarianism. And the results are restrictions in the range of membership and adaptability of these groups, and the development of legitimacy for structures of knowledge processing that are fundamentally opposed to constitutional democratic values and to long-term adaptiveness and innovation.

The alternative to such groups is the Community of Inquiry (CoI), a type of open community that is focused on problem solving and inquiry and individual rights of self-expression, on producing new knowledge, and on adaptation. CoIs also let the development of community take care of itself, a by-product of its success in problem solving, rather than an end in itself. In future blogs, I will provide case studies of each of the KM groups and illustrate both political and epistemological communitarianism in each.

Rules and Learning in List Servs

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:39:32 GMT

Ad Hominems, Personal Attacks, Labeling, and Learning In List Serv Communities

Until recently, I've been taking some time to participate in the act-km yahoo group where there has been an active discussion of Management vs. Governance-based approaches to Knowledge Management (KM). While I think the discussion has been a good one and that many useful views have been expressed during it, I've also noted, and not for the first time, the use of ad hominem arguments, personal attacks and labeling in exchanges within the group. Behavior of this sort has occurred in the AOK and com-prac groups as well. It also occurred in the KMCI Groups (the KMCI Virtual Chapter and KM Best_Practices groups) during the time of their sustained activity, until I changed and enforced rules prohibiting these practices.

One of the key responsibilities of Knowledge Managers is to facilitate knowledge production, and I've made clear in previous posts that knowledge production is critically dependent on knowledge claim evaluation and its smooth functioning. But knowledge claim evaluation cannot function smoothly when the error elimination process, along with its necessary component of criticism, becomes conflictful, rather than collaborative. How can KM prevent this from happening? How can it enable knowledge claim evaluation so that it is performed collaboratively and with, at most, moderate conflict?

I've written a good bit in answer to this question in my paper on "Bridging Knowledge Gaps" and I don't want to repeat what I've said there in this post. However, I will make a few remarks on how KCE can be encouraged by the moderators (the Knowledge Managers) of list serv groups who presumably have an interest in facilitating dialog that can help participants to create new knowledge (learn), and not merely to share information.

The key to facilitating dialog that can lead to learning is to establish a perspective on how exchanges, designed to both produce and share knowledge, will be carried out by members of the group. The perspective should be reinforced by adopting some basic rules, constantly and consistently applied by moderators, to prevent the inevitable conflicts expressed in the content of dialogue from getting out of control.

The Perspective

One perspective and, I conjecture, the best one from the viewpoint of producing knowledge through dialogue and exchange, has been offered by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Vol. 2, p. 225), and, more recently, in The Myth of the Framework, p. 12, edited by Mark A. Notturno. It was also expressed in Mark Notturno's, Science and the Open Society, p. 38, which I follow here. This perspective may be characterized as the critical rationalist attitude toward exchange and was expressed by Popper as:

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get closer to the truth."

This statement admirably expresses both the idea of our fallibility (See the quotation from Xenophanes in "All Life Is Problem Solving"), and the idea that our regulative ideal is to seek truth. Popper extended the critical rationalist attitude by offering three ethical principles that "form the basis of every rational discussion, that is, of every discussion undertaken in the search for truth" (See Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World, 1992, p. 199) The principles are:

The principle of fallibility: perhaps I am wrong and perhaps you are right. But we could easily both be wrong.
The principle of rational discussion: we want to try, as impersonally as possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory; a theory that is definite and criticizable.
The principle of approximation to the truth: we can nearly always come closer to the truth in a discussion which avoids personal attacks. It can help us to achieve a better understanding; even in those cases where we do not reach an agreement. (p. 199, above)

For our purposes here, I'll substitute the phrase "knowledge claim" for the word "theory", in Popper's second principle.

In viewing these principles please note that they emphasize (a) our fallibility, (b) the regulative ideal of getting closer to the truth, (c) rational discussion focused on knowledge claims that are criticizable, and (d) civil, impersonal exchange focused on critical analysis of the alternative views that parties to a discussion hold. The need for impersonality and civility is especially important in view of the emphasis on critical analysis of knowledge claims as the method of getting closer to the truth. The parties to an exchange are viewed as having the common goal of getting closer to the truth. But, because the method of getting there requires conflict, the form of the discussion must be disciplined to focus only on the views at issue and not on the holders of those views.

Now clearly, this idea of rational exchange is no "silver bullet". Many people are not interested in rational discussion and don't believe in its utility in arriving at knowledge. Many others don't believe that our objective in seeking knowledge should be to get closer and closer to the truth. They believe that they should seek "what works", or what predicts well, or what management will approve, or what the community can agree on. Finally, even if people do believe in seeking truth, and also trust and perform civil rational discussion, the conflict embodied in critical exchange may escalate, destroy civility and fail to produce new knowledge. In spite of these difficulties however, it seems to me that civil rational exchange, combined with truth seeking, is the method that, in the long run, is more effective than other methods of exchange in growing knowledge. For others who believe this, it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to suggest that we should organize our list serv groups based on the critical rationalist attitude and the principles I've expressed. I will provide more context for this perspective by considering the distinction between Communities of Practice and Communities of Inquiry.

Communities of Inquiry vs. Communities of Practice

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of individuals who freely associate in order to communicate with one another about knowledge claims each of them have, and about their experiences in attempting to solve work-related problems in areas in which they share an interest. CoPs vary in their focus. Some may be primarily concerned with knowledge sharing; others with knowledge production as well as knowledge sharing. Among those focused on both, some CoPs may be characterized by testing and evaluation processes in which a few control access to previous knowledge claims, or have authority to evaluate them, or in which knowledge claims are evaluated by consensus. But truth is not a function of consensus – not a kind of popularity contest. It is also not a function of the voice of managerial, or even expert, authority. It is a function of how well statements correspond with the facts, regardless of what authority believes, or what the majority opinion happens to be.

A type of CoP is a Community of Inquiry (CoI). A Community of Inquiry is distinguished by its:

Objective of producing knowledge that is closer to the truth
Emphasis on continuous testing and evaluation in knowledge claim evaluation attempting to eliminate falsehoods
Refusal to accept that community agreement on the survival of a knowledge claim establishes or justifies it
Members having equal and open access to the community’s previously produced knowledge
Equal opportunity to produce new knowledge claims, and
Equal access to the means to communicate new knowledge claims produced within the community

I hope you can see that the critical rationalist perspective already discussed is further specified by the CoI idea, which when applied to list serv groups emphasizes that the organization of participation in such groups should be democratic, and that continuous testing and evaluation of knowledge claim performance through open discussion is the standard for these groups, rather than community agreement claiming to establish or justify certain knowledge claims over others.

The Rules

While it's important to be clear about the principles guiding activity in a list serv group, it's also important to have rules expressing boundary constraints that may prevent the system state one is attempting to facilitate (the CoI state) from moving toward an alternative attractor that is not focused on producing knowledge that is closer to the truth. I believe there are three simple rules, that, if continuously enforced by moderators, can provide the sought for boundary constraints.

First, no personal attacks should be allowed in posts. This rule should be enforced post-by-post. The moderator should evaluate whether an attack has occurred. If so, the post should be rejected with an explanation of the reason for rejection and an invitation to resubmit after appropriate revision. No further censure or barring of the offending poster should be added to the post rejection. The emphasis here should be on instruction about what a personal attack is from the viewpoint of the moderator, and on the clear communication that they are absolutely prohibited.

Second, casual evaluative labeling of points of view in the absence of explanation should also be prohibited. Labeling can easily be seen as a personal attack by the party whose view is labeled. I know one well-known KM practitioner who punctuates his disagreement with others with single word pejorative labels wrapped into lengthier arguments. The labels express the practitioner's undocumented opinion of the views of those he disagrees with. Recently, in the middle of a longer explanation related to another argument, he characterized his correspondent's view as "naïve" without further explanation of why he thought so. This called forth an impassioned, perfectly well-reasoned response from the correspondent, which however, only served to escalate the intensity of conflict between the two. "The bottom line" is that labeling poisons the atmosphere of discourse. Our second rule therefore prohibits it and suggests that moderators should return posts with labels with instructions to eliminate them.

Lastly, no ad hominem arguments should be allowed in posts. Such arguments proceed by attacking the characteristics, circumstances, or actions, of a person making a claim, and then proceed to suggest or imply that because of these characteristics, circumstances, or actions, the claim, or a related argument made by the person from which the claim follows by deduction, is either false or invalid. The invalidity of the conclusions of ad hominem arguments are not, by the fact of their occurrence, particularly damaging, and they are easily countered in exchanges by persons subjected to them. The problem with them, however, is that the attacks on the characteristics, circumstances, or actions of the authors of the knowledge claims they are directed against, poison the atmosphere of civility, and elicit answering personal attacks from others. If moderators reject posts with ad hominem arguments in the first place, conflict in exchanges will be moderated and people are much more likely to learn something from their dialogues.

Conclusion

I can put the argument of this post pretty simply. We need list serv groups whose purpose is to produce knowledge and support learning. For those to work right, they need to be communities of inquiry, not just communities of practice. That means people in them must agree on the goal of getting closer to the truth, on doing this by using the method of evaluating competing knowledge claims exchanging critical evaluations, and by doing in this in a civil manner that avoids personal attacks. In my view this can be done by clearly stating the purposes and policies of such groups while applying the critical rationalist CoI model, and, still more specifically, by implementing rules prohibiting direct personal attacks, "labeling" of points of view, and ad hominem arguments. In the next post, I will take up a related topic called "The Poverty of Communitarianism".

On Definition

Wed, 19 May 2004 20:21:55 GMT

On Definition

Many in Knowledge Management (KM) prefer to avoid defining its meaning. Their view is that definition is a sterile, time wasting pastime contributing little or nothing to the real work of KM. My view is different. It is that definition is an important preliminary step on the road to specifying one's cognitive map of knowledge processing and KM, and, ultimately, to developing quality models useful for developing KM solutions. I also think that arguments over definition are not fruitless arguments, but important exchanges about what is a good starting point for developing a cognitive map of KM. The purpose of a definition is not to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for its use. Instead, its purpose is to answer a question like: “What do you mean by Knowledge Management?” with a short, incomplete answer that:

allows the questioner to infer something more of the cognitive map (or conceptual map, or semantic network) of the target of the question; and

facilitates the beginning of further communication, and perhaps learning relative to that cognitive map.

Figure 1 illustrates the idea of a cognitive map. Nodes represent concepts. Edges are relationships. Single headed arrows are asymmetric relationships. Double-headed arrows are bi-directional associations. Edges may be weighted between 0 and 1.00, or, alternatively, weighted with words such as “few,” “more,” “somewhat, and signed (+, -) for increase or decrease in the target node following a change in the source node. Since qualitative concepts can be represented in a cognitive map, it should be clear that the idea can be used to represent fuzzy relationships, as well as logically crisp ones. The cognitive map idea is therefore not limited to mathematical or precise logical relationships but can also accommodate less exacting formulations of relations between concepts.

Figure 7.1 A Cognitive Map

The light yellow ellipse highlights the area of definition. The gold ellipse does the same for specification. The orange ellipse the same for a measurement model. The pink area represents the full model. The green arrow represents a feedback relationship. Measures are experiential concepts. Abstractions are what we measure. The abstraction/measure boundary is crossed by measurement rules. A pattern of measurement rules, abstract relationships and associations among measures defines a measurement model. Keeping the complex and comprehensive pattern of the whole cognitive map in mind, and the small area represented by the definition, I will characterize the definition as the "elevator speech" (the 30 second expression of the idea, See Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, pp. 159-162) representing, however imperfectly, the cognitive map. That is, when communicating with others about any term. You can:

Refuse to explain it;
Define it;
Specify it; or
Construct a cognitive map of it.

Which would you rather do in response to a basic question from someone either at the beginning of a conversation or at a briefing? Do nothing? Give the “elevator speech?” Give the five-minute overview? Or give the whole briefing? And if there's disagreement over a specific definition there are a number of good reasons why that might be the case, other than mere love of philosophical disputation.

First, The definition may not provide enough of the definer’s cognitive map to evaluate their statements using the concept.

Second, the definition may not distinguish the concept from other concepts.

Third, the definition may redefine the term beyond common usage in a manner that promotes confusion in communication. (This is a frequent occurrence due to the desire of communicators to acquire the "halo effect" of certain terms for their frequently different concepts.)

Fourth, those disagreeing may forecast that bad model development will result (wasted time and effort) from the starting place for model construction provided by a particular definition. And

Fifth, the "definition" may be clearly be false.

So, once again, why bother to define? To save time in responding to a questioner, to create a basis for further communication with others, and last, to specify a cost-effective starting place for further specification, measurement, and modeling.

(Most of this post is excerpted from my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, pp. 105-107)

K-STREAM and TNKM

Wed, 12 May 2004 22:51:53 GMT

Sunrise in the Catskills (Thomas Cole, 1826)

K-STREAM

™

and The New Knowledge Management
(Co-authored with Mark W. McElroy)

"The New Knowledge Management" (TNKM) is about managing Knowledge Production and Integration and their outcomes. Its primary focus, however, is not on policies and programs that directly create and integrate knowledge, but rather on policies and programs that reinforce the self-organizing tendencies of agents in organizations to perform the sub-processes of Knowledge Production and Integration. So that leads to the first dictum of TNKM practice:

Don’t try to cause Knowledge Creation. Instead create and maintain policies and programs that enable people to do their own Knowledge Creation in response to Knowledge Gaps (knowledge problems) that are preventing them from reaching their objectives.

Next, how does one create and maintain such policies and programs? TNKM’s answer is that this should be done using the K-STREAM™ Methodology, which provides a comprehensive outline of how to practice TNKM and to implement knowledge processing policies and programs. The phases of K-STREAM™, however, are not executed using a “waterfall” model of workflow. Rather, K-STREAM™ specifies a “recursive methodology” with many opportunities to return to previous errors and correct them, and with a workflow pattern that is ”iterative and incremental.” A view of the phases of K-STREAM™ is illustrated in Figure 1

Figure 1: The Phases of K-STREAM™

Here are some of the key highlights of K-STREAM™ practice, expressed in the form of steps:

1. The objectives of a KM project or program and any Knowledge Problems to be solved in reaching it must be defined. A variety of methods may be used to do this. But K-STREAM™ favors Problem Specification workshops to do so.

2. Once the objective of new policies and/or programs are specified, all phases of an intervention project are planned. Plans are adjusted in response to changing conditions throughout the process.

3. An Ontology Model is defined for the project. This model is the basis of a variety of modeling, descriptive, analytical, and evaluation tasks and is the beginning of a cognitive map for the project or program. KMCI has developed an ontology template that provides a physical expression of its conceptual frameworks, including the CAS (complex adaptive systems) framework to use as a starting point. The template can then be modified using facilitation sessions, exchanges in communities of inquiry, knowledge cafes, expert interactions facilitated by expertise location applications, and other interactive and/or mind-mapping techniques.

4. A Measurement Model structure is created using the Ontology Model to produce ratio scales of all the key criterion and indicator variables in the model. Facilitation sessions are used to perform the measurement modeling, assisted by software for supporting such sessions and post-session modeling and analysis.

5. We then set about to describe the Current Environment, the Target Environment, and the gap between them. In developing the Target Environment description, K-STREAM™ uses the TNKM normative model of The Open Enterprise (OE), which is provided to K-STREAM™ licensees by KMCI, as a benchmark template, and also facilitation sessions.

6. Beginning with the Ontology Model, and referencing the Measurement Model, we begin to get at cause, policy and program impact, and dynamics by first selecting key variables for an Impact Model specifying causal relationships, and then by specifying competing structures of causal relationships envisioning policy and program impact. A variety of tools may be used in initially laying out the model, and communities of inquiry, social network analysis, value network analysis, story-telling, mind-mapping, IT tools for searching out relevant information, and facilitation can also assist the modeling task.

7. What is key in terms of practice, however, is to develop cause-and effect relations among a relatively small set of variables that can then be used as inputs into simulation and data analysis tools. It’s important in understanding this kind of activity, to realize that alternative policy and program alternatives are included in this modeling effort. One of its primary purposes is to provide a basis for both planning the likely impact of these alternatives, and for evaluating their impact after policies and programs are implemented.

8. In developing the Impact Model described earlier in step 6, and consistent with the first TNKM dictum mentioned above, it is crucial to TNKM that KM practitioners seek to create and maintain causal structures that are aimed at reinforcing the self-organizing tendencies of people to perform Knowledge Processing in particular ways. Mark McElroy, Steve Cavaleri, and Joseph Firestone (all long-time principals of KMCI) have developed a patent-pending method called The Policy Synchronization Method™ (PSM). PSM, under license from Macroinnovation, LLC, is used in K-STREAM™ to guide causal and dynamic modeling and to help guide the transition from the Current Environment to the preferred Target Environment of the Open Enterprise (OE).

9. Once step 6 has produced some alternative causal structures (Impact Models), these are used as starting points in simulation studies that compare competing KM interventions both before and after the fact, that more easily accommodate the introduction of feedback relationships into our models, and that facilitate measuring impact. The key practice element here is to use simulation to understand and measure the dynamics and impact of KM interventions intended to enhance Knowledge Production and Integration.

10. Another element of K-STREAM™ practice is to go beyond process or financial impact to measure non-monetary ROI. This is done by developing value interpretive benefit and cost models. The models allow comparison of monetary and non-monetary impacts of KM interventions on the same ratio scale of intrinsic value. Facilitation techniques, along with communities of inquiry and supporting software, are useful here in eliciting the priority judgements needed for the models.

11. An important continuing element of K-STREAM™ practice is Knowledge Claim Evaluation. All the knowledge-producing tasks listed above: problem recognition, ontology modeling, measurement modeling, gap assessment, causal/impact modeling, and measuring benefits and costs of KM impact, involve both Knowledge Claim Formulation and Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE). We perform KCE using the framework presented in Chapter 5 of “Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management,” by Firestone and McElroy (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003). The KCE framework offers a number of evaluation criteria and also recognizes that other criteria may be added at any time if they seem appropriate to a particular need. The concept underlying KCE (i.e., the one favored in TNKM) is “Fair Comparison” of competing alternatives. Value judgments and risk analysis and measurement are built into the KCE process (again, see Chapter 5 of “Key Issues…”).

12. After an intervention is implemented, K-STREAM™ prescribes continuous monitoring of impact, benefits, and costs traceable to the intervention. To do this we use measurement tools including business performance metrics specified in the Measurement Model. In addition, TNKM practice also requires that a content analysis tool capable of mapping out changes in the artifact portion of an organization’s Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB) be used to help in measuring the impact of KM interventions.

13. Lastly, this summary of K-STREAM™ practice is admittedly sparse. We have not said much about IT tools and have only indicated in a sketchy way where a number of the most recognizable KM techniques would fit into this picture. Even more, however, we’ve not included discussion of the full range of possibilities of practice that can enter K-STREAM™. Indeed, TNKM practice is an open structure and any of the classical techniques of the social sciences or of Quality Management may prove useful in KM projects using K-STREAM™.

TNKM does specify a pattern of practice for KM, and certainly advocates a heavy emphasis on frameworks, measurement, modeling, impact, value, and risk analysis, and the Knowledge Life Cycle, including “Fair Comparison”-based KCE for Knowledge Production and Integration. But, it is fundamentally open as to which KM intervention techniques or combinations of techniques are keys to TNKM. They may or may not be key practices in a particular project, policy and program context; but Communities of Practice, Social Network Analysis, Value Network Analysis, Storytelling, Knowledge Cafes, Facilitation Sessions, Teams, Portal Systems, Best Practices Systems (when properly constructed to include meta-claims), Mind Mapping, Expertise Locators, and other popular interventions are all legitimate elements in a K-STREAM™ toolbox.

K-STREAM™ is the only methodology for practicing The New Knowledge Management. It is also:

The only comprehensive KM methodology that addresses Knowledge Production, Knowledge Integration, and processes at the KM-Level itself
The only KM Methodology that explicitly recognizes the role of self-organization in Knowledge Processing and Knowledge Management and does it through a patent-pending method
The only KM Methodology that provides both a comprehensive conceptual framework and an Ontology Software Template for applying it to measurement, causal, dynamic, and impact modeling, and measuring costs and benefits of KM interventions
The only KM Methodology that both recommends a set of core tools for tasks common to all KM projects, and at the same time provides an open tool box in that it allows the use of a the wide variety of methods, techniques, tools, and procedures that have been developed in the Social Sciences, Operations Research And Management Science, Quality Management, and KM itself.

For More Information

Here is specific information about KMCI's K-STREAM™ Certificate Program in Knowledge Management Strategy and Methodology. If you're interested in KM practice, you'll want to look carefully at this workshop, team-taught by the authors of this post. It provides specific instruction in implementing programs and projects in The New Knowledge Management. We believe that K-STREAM™ is the most comprehensive one-week face-to-face workshop in KM Methodology available today. But you will evaluate that for yourself by looking at comparable offerings.

You’ll find more information on TNKM at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or KMCI Press.

Are There Core KM Tools & Techniques?

Wed, 12 May 2004 20:20:36 GMT

Stonehenge (J. W. M. Turner, 1828)

Are There Core Tools and Techniques of Knowledge Management?
(Co-authored with Mark W. McElroy)

Where is the Core of KM Practice?

The goal of Knowledge Management is to enhance Knowledge Processing and indirectly to improve the quality of knowledge claims, beliefs, and ultimately business decision making.

Sometimes it is said that KM includes a concern with how knowledge in organizations is used in business processes and business decision making. But knowledge is used in every decision we make, and in every process we execute. So it seems that if we designated knowledge use as a concern of Knowledge Management, we would be saying that KM extends into all operational areas of managerial concern. This is an untenable, rather imperialistic, position that makes KM overlap substantially with the areas of responsibility of other forms of management, and denies that operational business managers, as opposed to Knowledge Managers, have the responsibility for the effective use of knowledge in operational business domains.

To accomplish the goal of KM, Knowledge Managers make policies and then implement them through programs, procedures, and activities. So KM is about:

Planning

(1) Determining the current state of Knowledge Processing

(2) Visualizing a target environment characterized by multiple objectives

(3) Determining the gap between (1) and (2)

(4) Planning policies, programs, procedures and activities to close the gap

Acting

(5) Implementing the outcomes of (4)

Monitoring and Evaluating

(6) Measuring and evaluating the impact of (5) on (3) and on aspects of the enterprise through time

Planning and Acting

(7) Adjusting (4) and (5)

Monitoring and Evaluating

(8) Measuring and evaluating impact again

Planning, Acting, Monitoring, and Evaluating

(9) Adjusting again, and so on until the cycle starts again with a reformulation of (2) through (4)

What does the above suggest for KM practice? Most generally, we think, it suggests that KM may, indeed, have a family of core techniques and tools that are needed to execute the above pattern that should be used in nearly every KM intervention.

Current practice in KM is not focused on such a central core, but rather on implementing specific solutions that are thought to be worth trying to bring benefits to the enterprise. Interventions such as enterprise information portals, communities of practice, knowledge cafés, social network analysis, and story-telling projects, however helpful they may be in developing KM solutions, are not at the core of KM. That is, they are not necessarily part of any KM project implementing an intervention designed to enhance knowledge processing and to evaluate the results of such an intervention. Rather, they are knowledge processing solutions that Knowledge Managers sometimes implement, quite separate and apart from the tools used by Knowledge Managers in support of their own activities and interventions, more generally.

What are some of the techniques and tools that are, or at least should be, part of every KM intervention, because they are indispensable in implementing the above pattern of KM intervention?

Planning and Implementing: Project Management and PM Tools

Everyday Knowledge Management activity is about:

Symbolic Representation (of the KM function to others),
Building External Relationships with Others Practicing KM
Leadership
KM-level Knowledge Production
KM level Knowledge Integration
Crisis Handling
Changing Knowledge Processing Rules
Negotiating for Resources with Representatives of Other Organizational Processes, and
Resource Allocation for knowledge processes and for other KM processes

But one or more of these types of activities are often combined in making policies, and initiating, implementing, and evaluating programs and in planning and implementing projects for doing these things. Most large organizations perform projects to make KM interventions and use project management tools. Knowledge of them is so common we won’t even bother to mention any. Suffice it to say that project management software is one of the core tools of KM and this fact is forgotten all too frequently in discussions of KM tools and techniques.

Planning: Visualization and Business Drawing Applications

KM interventions require visualization of static and dynamic relations in the enterprise, including hierarchical relations among entities and among attributes. A good way to begin such visualization is to use vector-based business drawing software such as SmartDraw, Visio, Micrographix, or Flowcharter. Such programs can produce flow charts, business process diagrams, network diagrams, UML diagrams, tree diagrams, cause-and-effect (fishbone) diagrams and many other types.

Planning: Modeling Means-ends Connections, The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Decision Tree Tools

Planning KM interventions involves specifying a set of tasks that, when implemented, one expects will enhance some aspect of knowledge processing. We arrive at these tasks by thinking through strategies and tactics that we think will close the gap between the current state of knowledge processing and the future state we desire. The set of tasks are the means to various sub-objectives, objectives and finally the goal state of knowledge processing. Software tools that can help us to visualize this sort of task, objective, sub-objective, and goal hierarchy include software that specifies decision trees or analytical hierarchies such as Expert Choice, InfoHarvest, and Ergo. These applications are very good at specifying measurement relations, means-ends connections and at assembling them into hierarchies, but they are not formidable simulation tools for exploring the consequences of analytic hierarchy theory structures.

Planning: Simulation Modeling Techniques and Tools

There are, however, other simulation tools we can use to build and simulate models based on inputs from the results of analytic hierarchy modeling. Simulation tools are available exhibiting a great range of power and capabilities. For KM, however, we favor System Dynamics tools because they are relatively simple to use and support visualization and understanding of models. The leading toolsets in this area at present are ithink and Stella (High Performance Systems), Vensim (Ventana), and Powersim (Powersim Software).

Planning: Balanced Scorecards and Business Performance Measurement Tools

The field of Business Performance Measurement (BPM) is burgeoning. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) vendors are now plentiful and business performance measurement and monitoring software is becoming commonplace. BPM and BSC tools are important for KM because we need to both plan and evaluate the impact of KM on the organization generally, and business performance metrics are essential to these tasks. BSC/BPM tools must be used with care. Sucess is dependent on carefully relating good conceptual frameworks to good descriptors and indicators. The tools themselves don't guarantee the quality of the underlying measurement modeling associated with using them. Vendors include: Cognos, Crystal Decisions, Dialog Strategy, Open Ratings, Active Strategy, Corvu, Ergometrics, QPR Software, SAS, and others.

Impact Analysis (Monitoring and Evaluating): Model Testing Techniques and Tools

Once plans are implemented, the results of interventions must be monitored and evaluated and the impact of intervention measured. A range of techniques are useful for impact measurement and evaluation. First, techniques and tools used in planning, such as AHP, System Dynamics, and BPM/BSC tools, are all relevant here, as well. In addition, however, techniques and software tools of statistics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be used to analyze results and test previously formulated models. The four primary statistical analysis vendors, SAS, SPSS, Statistica, and Insightful, all provide a range of indispensable tools of data transformation and multivariate analysis as well as more recently developed capabilities in neural networks and tree analysis. Products from smaller companies such as (a) Ward Systems, Inc. and Neurosolutions, Inc. specializing in neural network, fuzzy, and genetic algorithmic modeling, (b) Salford Systems, Inc. specializing in tree analysis and Multi-Attribute Regression Splines (MARS) predictive analysis, and (c) Megaputer inc., specializing in a range of the newer AI-based techniques of analysis, are also important.

Tracking (Monitoring and Evaluating): Semantic Analysis and Networking Techniques and Tools

The primary application of these tools is in monitoring and evaluating the continuing impact of KM interventions. Specifically, we must measure the continuing impact of interventions on quality of Knowledge processing and knowledge outcomes, by tracking patterns of knowledge production and distinguishing knowledge from information in order to measure whether our interventions are effective in producing knowledge and integrating it into business processes over time. In order to do this, we need a tool that models and tracks both knowledge claims and the meta-claims appearing in text content that describe their performance. Two products with at least some of the capability needed to do this are Semagix and Clear Forest, making them alternative candidate core tools of KM.

Conclusion: What about “KM” Techniques and Tools?

With the possible exception of semantic analysis techniques and tools, none of the other categories identified are normally associated with KM. Instead, KM publications, conferences, e-mail list serves, and books most often focus on: Communities of Practice, Story-Telling, Best Practices Databases, Enterprise Information and "Knowledge" Portals, Social Network Analysis, “Open Spaces”, Knowledge Cafés, and others. All of these can be useful KM interventions or components of interventions. But all of them are optional, and none of them essential, in every KM project, because the interventions chosen are likely to vary with the problems Knowledge Managers are trying to solve.

The moral of the story we are telling in this paper is that there are techniques and tools, not unique to KM, but nevertheless essential for nearly every KM project that all KM practitioners should be exposed to. These tools and techniques are not directly focused on KM interventions, but on planning them, evaluating them, and tracking their consequences. These tools and techniques include Project Management, Visualization and Drawing tools, Analytic Hierarchy Process, System Dynamics and simulation tools more generally, Balanced Scorecard and Business Performance Measurement, Statistical and AI analytical tools, and finally Semantic Analysis and Networking techniques and tools. They are essential because they always support implementing key steps in KM project interventions. It is remarkable that they are not front and center in KM discussions. They should be, and hopefully this paper will go some way toward securing them their proper place in the constellation of KM practice and education.

For More Information

Specific Information about the core tools in KM is available in KMCI's K-STREAM™ Certificate Program in Knowledge Management Strategy and Methodology. If you're interested in KM practice, you'll want to look carefully at this workshop, team-taught by the authors of this post. It provides specific instruction in implementing programs and projects in The New Knowledge Management. We believe that K-STREAM™ is the most comprehensive one-week face-to-face workshop in KM Methodology available today. But you will evaluate that for yourself by looking at comparable offerings.

You’ll find more information on TNKM at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or KMCI Press.

KM From The Top

Wed, 12 May 2004 18:54:14 GMT

Evening of the Deluge (J. W. M. Turner, 1843)

Knowledge Management: Taking It From the Top

Elsewhere (in Key Issues . . ., Ch. 3) Mark McElroy and I have provided a critical commentary on a variety of definitions of KM. Frankly, I think they are mostly unclear about the "knowledge" component, and equally unclear about the "management" component of the phrase that names our field. But since there is such disagreement over this key definition, I think it's useful for me to state the view of "The New Knowledge Management" (TNKM) on KM itself.

Knowledge: the Unified Theory

Human systems produce knowledge to help them adapt to their environment. Knowledge is used in decision making and as an enabler of actions that follow decisions. Knowledge is an outcome of some of the system behavioral processes I've written about in previous posts, but it is not the behavioral processes, themselves. Instead, it is an encoded, tested, evaluated, and surviving structure of information (e.g. DNA instructions, beliefs, and linguistic claims) whose biological function is to help the system creating it to adapt.

In the TNKM view, there are three types of knowledge that fit this definition:

Encoded structures in physical systems allowing those objects to adapt to their environment (genetic and neural knowledge);
Tested, evaluated, and surviving beliefs (in minds) about the world (mental knowledge), the good, the right, and the beautiful; and
Tested, evaluated, and surviving, sharable (objective), linguistic formulations about the world (artifact-based or cultural knowledge).

Following Popper's account (Popper and Eccles, 1977, Pp. 120-147), evolution begins within material/physical structures. When biological creatures evolve, they first develop genetic structures (material knowledge) that allow them to achieve their goals through limited adaptive and learning capabilities. They have brains, but do not have minds. Minds (mental processes) evolve as “control mechanisms for the brain.” And as we have seen, minds allow agents to develop beliefs for tracking reality (mental knowledge) and enhancing adaptation. However, the beliefs created by mind cannot incorporate an objective shared perspective on reality. Therefore, their fit with external conditions is less than ideal.

So evolution proceeds further. It creates creatures that not only have brains, minds, and consciousness, but also creatures that have language and culture. These creatures can use language and culture to create knowledge claims that incorporate a sharable perspective on reality, and this perspective, in turn, with continued inquiry, can produce knowledge claims that benefit from this shared perspective and that can even correspond closely with reality. In other words, the creation of language and culture creates more objective formulations (structures or networks of knowledge claims) that place constraints on the personal, subjective beliefs of the mind. These subjective beliefs, in turn, help it to better understand reality, which it must do if it is to fulfill its role as the controller of behavior.

The notion that the mind is “a control mechanism for the brain” is part of Popper’s more general formulation of the evolutionary development of a system of “plastic controls” for any organism. The basic idea is that higher order control systems emerge out of lower order ones and exercise a regulative function on them through “downward causation” involving selection of lower level functional activities. Thus, mental self-consciousness allows us to regulate and affect, without determining, impulses in the brain. And language-moderated social interactions and cultural products, in their turn, have a regulative effect on what we believe and more generally on states of mind. For more detail, see Popper (1972, pp. 235-255).

Management

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, definitions and views of management have proliferated, as has the use of the term "management" to describe any activity that seems to involve organizing anybody or anything. In the human area, the general trend is from command-and-control forms of management, that assume a deterministic view of the world with command as the cause and everything else as an effect; to management that emphasizes motivating, leading, and enabling workers who cannot be commanded if one wants good results, because both they and management are part of a complex adaptive system whose behavioral properties emerge as a result of self-organizing patterns of interaction.

These days, students of management tend to view it as what managers do. The classic work in that area is Henry Mintzberg's. He categorized management activity as: interpersonal, including figurehead or symbolic representing activity, leading, building external relations, information processing, including monitoring and describing events and occurrences, and disseminating information, and decision processing activity including entrepreneurial, crisis handling, resource allocating, and negotiating activity. I accept Mintzberg's viewpoint in general and believe that it provides the outlines of a theoretical framework for describing KM activity (See Key Issues . . ., Ch. 3).

Organizational Knowledge Management: What is it?

The three types of knowledge distinguished in the unified theory are used in decisions and ultimately in organizational and group behavioral processes. New mental and cultural knowledge are both outcomes of the interaction of such processes with individual processes. And even though organizational processes can't create new genetic knowledge, they can influence the neural-based aspect of organizations directly through recruitment processes, and changes in neural knowledge indirectly through their effects on cultural and mental knowledge, which in turn has an impact on neural patterning.

Are all or most of the processes affecting knowledge, management processes? TNKM says no. New but routine perceptual knowledge is produced in operational business and business management processes (See Organizational Problem Solving or Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, Ch. 2). New problem-solving knowledge, including general knowledge, is produced in knowledge processes, which involve doing knowledge production and integration, but not managing them (See the three-tier model).

There are other processes existing in organizations that affect knowledge, apart from operational business, management, and knowledge processes. These are comprised of activities of the sort identified by Mintzberg and listed earlier. They are the organization's KM processes. That is, they are what knowledge management is.

Of course, KM processes differ a bit from Mintzberg's categorization. For one thing, they are not targeted on the organizational system, but on its knowledge processes. For another, instead of information processing, they include knowledge production and knowledge integration directed at solving problems of Knowledge Management and, lastly, entrepreneurial KM processes are those that change the rules governing knowledge processing.

The organizational function, or, if you like, the core value proposition of KM processes is to maximize the quality of available problem solving knowledge in organizations in a sustainable way. That can't be done directly, but only by management activity targeted on enhancing knowledge processing itself. It also can't be done through command-and-control management of such processing, because knowledge processing is an emergent that results from self-organizing activity directed at problems. To enhance knowledge processing, KM has to enable it by reinforcing the self-organizing activities comprising it. These self-organizing activities integrate in organizations to form the sub-processes of knowledge production and integration, the targets of KM. I've talked about these in a number of earlier posts and will continue to talk about them in future posts.

KM: The Discipline

So far, I've characterized Knowledge Management as an activity-based process phenomenon. But the term can also be used to refer to a discipline. In that case, the TNKM view, consistent with the process use of the term, is that KM is a management discipline that focuses on enhancing Knowledge processing.

For More Information

You’ll find more information on TNKM at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or KMCI Press.

Why Is KCE So Important?

Mon, 10 May 2004 03:09:39 GMT

View of Florence from San Miniato (Thomas Cole,
1837)

The Importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation

In my last post, I pointed to the problem of the absence of work on Knowledge Claim Evaluation in Knowledge management, offered some thoughts by way of explaining why this was the case, and ended with a statement about what was required for the job ahead. My account asserted the importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE), but did little to explain why I thought it should be such a central concern of KM.

In my first post, "All Life is Problem Solving", I wrote about the importance of error elimination knowledge making and problem solving and said the following. The last of the three steps in making knowledge is error elimination or "matching". This step is the gateway to knowledge. But it is, as Popper pointed out, fundamentally negative in character. It is about eliminating mistakes and not about supporting any of one's tentative solutions. In animals lacking consciousness, mistakes are eliminated, when the animal receives negative reinforcement from the environment for selecting the wrong solution. That is, the animal in question can only learn by experiencing the negative consequences of its mistaken expectation and ensuing decision. Often the wrong choice means that the animal making the choice is eliminated along with its mistake. Animals with consciousness and especially sharing language have a great advantage over other animals. We can eliminate errors and learn by testing our solutions through the surrogate processes of criticism, controlled testing, and comparative analysis, before we take a decision. We, unlike other animals, can manage our knowledge making so that "our worst ideas die in our stead", and our best ones inform our decisions and actions. But to do so, we must use our gift of language and be diligent in criticism, testing, and evaluation of our tentative solutions. In other words, we must attempt to eliminate our errors through KCE.

In my second post on "Organizational Problem Solving", I noted that KCE is at the very center of knowledge processing and knowledge production. Think about it. Without it, what is the difference between information and knowledge? How do we know that we are integrating knowledge rather than just information? Or that the “knowledge” we’re using in operational business processes is of high quality? Absent a social process in organizations, be it formal or informal, through which competing claims can be held to tests of veracity or verisimilitude, how can we possibly make judgments about truth versus falsity? Knowledge Claim Evaluation, then, is what gives us the ability to know knowledge when we see it, and therefore to know when we've produced it.

Organizations clearly differ in the quality and success of their Knowledge Claim Evaluation processes and in the quality of knowledge produced by them. KM has many objectives. Enhancing organizational capability to get information from external sources, enhancing creativity and capability to formulate relevant knowledge claims, enhancing the process of sharing knowledge claims that have survived KCE are all very important. But what can Knowledge Managers do that could possibly be more important, than enhancing Knowledge Claim Evaluation the very sub-process that is the gateway to knowledge? I'll leave you to ask that question of yourself, and to wonder, as I do, why so few practitioners in KM talk or write about such enhancements.

For More Information

You’ll find much more information on the views offered in this post, and on training in the New Knowledge Management at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Elsevier.

Ignoring KCE

Wed, 05 May 2004 16:24:42 GMT

Angels Standing in the Sun (J. W. M. Turner, 1846)

What About Knowledge Claim Evaluation?

It must be the times. Go to any Knowledge Management (KM) professional meeting. Read any KM Journal or popular magazine. Join any KM newsgroup. The story is the same. Except for those pesky KMCI types and a few of their friends, no one seems to be interested in practices, methods, or theory about evaluating knowledge claims. Now, given the general and long-standing interest in decision support, and the fact that KM is often justified as improving it, isn't this passing strange?

The problem of knowledge claim evaluation is a decision problem itself. It is the problem of selecting the best among competing knowledge claims, and the problem exists whether or not one thinks that knowledge is a type of belief network, or whether it is a type of semantic network. For even if one thinks that semantic networks are only information, one should still care very much about the relative quality of information and its relationship to knowledge (viewed as belief) and should, therefore, select among competing knowledge claims by deciding which one has the highest quality. So, why aren't KM professionals concerned about Knowledge Claim Evaluation?

Explanation1: "The Old Knowledge Management" and Knowledge Sharing

"The Old Knowledge Management" is about Knowledge Sharing. Its value propositions are better decision support, higher job productivity and performance, and capture of knowledge assets that would otherwise leave the organization. The Old Knowledge Management is not about making new knowledge, problem solving or innovation. So why should it be concerned with Knowledge Claim Evaluation, the sub-process that allows us to decide what is knowledge and what is "just information"?

Even if one thinks there's some truth to this explanation, the Old Knowledge Management has now been supplemented by a concern for knowledge making and innovation. "Second Generation Knowledge Management" (SGKM) has arrived and KM is concerned with much more than knowledge sharing as a visit to any of the major periodicals and news magazines in the field will attest. Yet the appearance of SGKM has hardly increased the concern for Knowledge Claim Evaluation within the mainstream of KM.

Explanation 2: The Belief that Knowledge Making in Business is a Practical Activity and Includes No Time or Resources for Knowledge Claim Evaluation

I've heard from some that Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not very important in KM, because it is a business activity, process, or discipline, not a science. The implication, of course, is that science uses Knowledge Claim Evaluation because of its deliberative, exacting, theoretical, and precise character, while business with its much more imprecise and action-oriented practical reasoning just can't afford the time and effort that the deliberative approach to knowledge making requires.

This line of reasoning, if it represents a widespread attitude in KM, may provide a part of the reason why there is so little concern about Knowledge Claim Evaluation in KM. As I explained in All Life Is Problem Solving, however, all of our non-routine knowledge making, and that means whether in science or business, or any other area of organizational or human behavior, involves problem recognition, formulating tentative solutions, and error elimination. In organizations we do perform Knowledge Claim Evaluation. It is how we attempt to eliminate errors in our knowledge claims. The only important questions are whether we do so with full awareness of what we are doing, and whether our practices produce knowledge claims that are effective in raising the quality of our business process performance or not.

Explanation 3: The Belief that Knowledge Claim Evaluation Is Based On Authority

Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not of great concern to KM because, since knowledge claims cannot be justified as true through evaluation, there are only three theories of evaluation that count in organizations anyway: (1) what managers think, (2) what experts think, and (3) what one's community thinks. In all three cases, some form of authority: managerial, expert, or community consensus, "justifies" our knowledge claims.

This is another view that may explain why Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not of greater interest to KM. If only authority can justify our knowledge claims, the issue of how we ought to select among knowledge claims is of no importance. We have no choice. What we select is determined by various authorities, by politics and not any rational procedure.

Explanation 4: The Belief That Knowledge Is Socially Constructed, Determined By Social And Cultural Background, and Unaffected By Reality

Social constructivism, an epistemological theory held by many in the social sciences, holds that reality as well as our knowledge of it is socially constructed and that such knowledge constructions are unaffected by an independently existing reality. Social constructivism often goes along with two other beliefs. First, the distinction between objective and subjective knowledge is meaningless because all knowledge is a function of our social and cultural context and can only be justified relative to that context. And second, such justification can only be provided by community consensus, since only it reliably reflects the influence of social and cultural context on our knowledge. Since community consensus is the only legitimate basis of knowledge, explanation 4 partly agrees with explanation 3. It holds that Knowledge Claim Evaluation is a simple matter of determining whether a knowledge claim network is backed by a community consensus. So we need not spend our time worrying about effective methods of Knowledge Claim Evaluation. All we need do is see to it that knowledge is effectively shared so that the community is informed. Then we just need to wait for consensus to emerge.

Of course, the problem with this reasoning begins with reality. Reality is not socially constructed. Our knowledge of it is certainly mediated by our social networks, along with our psychological predispositions, and biological heritage, but it is also influenced by reality itself, which exists apart from our social construction of it. Since reality, and our knowledge of it, are it least partly independent, the issues of the correspondence of our knowledge claims with reality, i.e. of their truth, and of which of a competing set of knowledge claims is closest to the truth, need to be faced. And since neither correspondence to reality, nor closeness of approach to the truth can be measured directly, facing these issues means facing the issue of how we can effectively evaluate our knowledge claims.

We know enough about knowledge claim evaluation through the centuries to know that it is not effective to use any form of authority, including community consensus as a criterion for evaluating knowledge claims. Knowledge claims cannot be validated by community consensus, but rather should be continuously tested and evaluated in order to eliminate error.

The Job Ahead

Whether KM's lack of concern about Knowledge Claim Evaluation is due to the idea that only knowledge sharing is important, or to the idea that business is imprecise and neither needs nor has the time nor the resources for it, or to the idea that Knowledge Claim Evaluation in business can only be based on authority, or, to the idea that reality and our knowledge of it are both socially constructed, or all four, or some other reasons that haven't occurred to me, is interesting, but, in the end, secondary. What is important, is that this lack of concern means that KM has not been doing anything to enhance the key sub-process in the Knowledge Life Cycle, Knowledge Claim Evaluation. It hasn't been doing anything to distinguish among knowledge claims according to their quality, which also implies that it hasn't been doing anything to distinguish objective knowledge from information, or to measure the success of knowledge claim evaluation in producing effective knowledge.

Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not ignored in every field of business application today. Not even in fields that are closely related to Knowledge Management. Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining (KDD) has, since its inception in the 1990s, considered validating models an important activity, and continues to produce useful research on validation criteria that are applied in model estimation. But KDD has had little effect on KM, perhaps because its orientation toward using formal reasoning in development of its own perspectives is foreign to most KM practitioners.

The job ahead is to develop methods of Knowledge Claim Evaluation that will enable knowledge workers to do a better job of selecting among competing knowledge claims. In our book, Key Issues In the New Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, Chapter 5, Mark McElroy and I have begun this process by outlining a theory of fair comparison and two formal approaches to measuring "truthlikeness". But this is just the first little bit of work in an area that requires substantial effort.

Governance and KM

Sat, 01 May 2004 19:28:55 GMT

Approach to Venice (J. W. M. Turner, 1843)

A Governance-Based Approach to Knowledge Management: A KMCI Position Statement (Co-authored with Mark W. McElroy)

Executive Summary

Until recently there has been little disagreement within Knowledge Management (KM) over the idea that KM activities derive their authority from organizational management and ultimately from the CEO. This view has given rise to the often-repeated principle that KM strategy should be aligned with organizational or corporate strategy.

This report presents the alternative view, derived from KMCI's New Knowledge Management research program, that Knowledge Management and its strategy must be autonomous in relation to operational management and its strategy, if it is to avoid a conflict of interest and the undermining of KM itself. It argues further that KM is a fiduciary responsibility of Boards of Directors and, where relevant, legislatures, and that the KM function should derive its authority from and be directly responsible to such Boards and legislatures. This in turn implies that KM as currently practiced in organizations rests on an insecure foundation, one that is likely to lead to its failure due to conflicts of interest introduced by corporate management.

In view of this conclusion, KMCI announces its commitment to further develop and seek adherents to a Governance-based approach to KM and to advise against further pursuit of the currently dominant Management-based approaches. The main body of this report will set the Governance-based approach in the context of KMCI's overall approach to The New Knowledge Management (TNKM) and then will develop the basis for the Governance-based approach through an analysis of three of the components of TNKM. More . . .

Storytelling and KM

Sat, 01 May 2004 16:58:01 GMT

Stories and KM

Storytelling and Knowledge Management

Storytelling and Knowledge Management

In earlier blogs on storytelling I talked about its role in problem solving and Knowledge Integration. This blog will complete my remarks on how storytelling relates to knowledge processing and KM. My analysis will use KMCI's KM Framework discussed in Firestone and McElroy (2003), and Firestone (2000). Figure 1 summarizes the framework's activity categories. All 9 categories occur at the top level of the three-tier model discussed in "Knowledge Management and Strategy".

Figure 1 KMCI's KM Framework (adapted from Mintzberg, 1973)

Storytelling and KM-Level Management Processes

Among KM activities it is the KM-level business processes that actually manage the knowledge processing performed by other than KM-level knowledge workers. But the KM-level needs to manage itself as well. It does so through Symbolic Representation, Building External Relationships and Leadership activities.

Symbolic Representation

Symbolic representation is an aspect of all managerial activity. Managers have authority. Part of what maintains that authority is the symbolism used and manipulated by them to express and claim the legitimacy of their authority. One of the best ways to manipulate the symbols of managerial authority is through storytelling, either performed by the manager or by supporters of the manager's authority. One way to undermine a manager's informal authority is to tell stories illustrating the fallibility of a manager.

Symbolic representation activities include participation in organizational ceremonies and functions by personnel identified with knowledge management. Storytelling at organizational functions is an important way for KM representatives to reinforce their authority. And skill in storytelling is an important skill for such personnel to have.

Leadership Activities

Leading includes hiring, training, motivating, monitoring, and evaluating staff. It also includes informing and persuading non-KM agents within the enterprise of the validity of KM process activities, and consensus-building about those activities. In most of these activities, storytelling is used frequently and is an important skill. It is hard to imagine leaders motivating or persuading without the aid of stories, or consensus-building occurring without storytelling, either.

Building External Relationships

Building external relationships means performing those activities intended to produce friendships, alliances, and "partnerships" with decision makers external to one's own company. These relationships are essential to knowledge managers for acquiring sources of information. They are also essential for providing "role models" for knowledge managers. And storytelling? Can you imagine making friends, building alliances, and concluding partnerships without using stories? When you do these things you have to tell your own story, and the story of your company, and the story of how you and your company fit together.

Storytelling and KM-level Knowledge Processes

Knowledge Managers, like other knowledge workers, perform a lot of routine work, punctuated by new challenges, accompanied by knowledge gaps, in their case about how to manage enhancing knowledge processing among other knowledge workers, problem recognition, knowledge claim formulation, knowledge claim evaluation, and knowledge integration. In other words, knowledge life cycles occur ay the KM-level as well as at the business process/business management levels, and knowledge production and knowledge integration occur at the KM level as well.

In previous blogs, I've described how storytelling fits into knowledge production and knowledge integration. The role of storytelling is essentially the same at the KM-level.

Storytelling and KM-level Business Processes

KM-level business processes include: crisis handling, changing knowledge processing rules, allocating KM resources in interventions, and negotiating agreements with managers of other functions.

Crisis Handling

Crisis Handling involves such things as meeting CEO requests for new competitive intelligence in an area of high strategic interest for an enterprise, and directing rapid development of a KM support infrastructure in response to requests from high level executives. Crisis handling can involve the full range of other KM activities. So the role of storytelling in crisis handling is described by its role in the other activities.

Changing Knowledge Processing Rules

Information acquisition, individual and group learning, knowledge claim formulation, knowledge claim evaluation, broadcasting, searching/retrieving, teaching, and sharing are all at least partly composed of rule governed tasks. Knowledge workers execute these tasks and knowledge managers produce the process rules. Knowledge managers also change the rules once they produce new knowledge about them.

Changing the rules of knowledge processing requires communicating the changes to knowledge workers. Stories are part of this communication process and may be used to communicate problems with old rules and the advantages of new ones.

Allocating KM Resources in Interventions

Allocating resources includes allocations for knowledge processing and KM support infrastructure, training, professional conferences, salaries for KM staff, funds for new KM programs, etc. Since allocating resources involves using a range of communication methods, techniques, and activities, stories are as much a part of this process as they are of any process relying on communication. Stories are not the only things that are communicated as part of this process, but they are one of many types of content that have a part to play.

Negotiating Agreements with Managers of Other Functions

Negotiating agreements with representatives of other business processes over levels of effort for KM, the shape of KM programs, the ROI expected of KM activities, etc., is an essential knowledge management function. And this function too, involves communication, persuasion, and informing others of one's case. It is yet another area in which storytelling is one of the methods used in performing a process. In negotiating, storytelling may be particularly important since long negotiations over complex issues often require using stories along with analogies to drive home particular points during negotiation.

Storytelling, Knowledge Processing and Knowledge Management

This blog completes a series relating storytelling to problem solving, knowledge integration, and Knowledge Management. I've tried to show that storytelling and stories are, or can be useful in nearly all of the sub-processes of problem solving and knowledge integration and all of the activities of KM. But having said that, I must again also point to the limitations of stories and story telling. First, we must keep in mind that stories describe happenings. They are localized in time and space and
describe a pattern of particulars, rather than a general model. Stories rely on assumptions that are general in character, but they don't explicitly offer generalizations as knowledge claims. So they can't help where generalizations are needed either in knowledge production or integration or to add to our understanding.

Second, enthusiasm for stories and storytelling should be tempered in the area of problem solving, by an equivalent enthusiasm for critically assessing competing stories, because stories are conjectural in nature and could easily be false. In the first blog in this series, I proposed that we should pledge to cultivate a critical attitude toward them, keeping in mind that if our stories survive our best criticisms they are more likely to provide a better basis for decisions.

Third, in knowledge integration I pointed out that stories can be viewed as effective in eliciting real understanding or as effective in eliciting manipulated agreement and that in cases where the latter is true, knowledge integration through storytelling may create agreement but doesn't help the organization to adapt.

Fourth, in discussing the role of stories in knowledge integration, I pointed out that a problem involved in evaluating the role of stories in knowledge integration and other areas of knowledge processing as well, is the generality of the idea of stories. if we look at every narrative that describes an event, occurrence, or happening, as a story, then it is a trivial conclusion that stories are very important in knowledge processing and knowledge integration.

Finally, in this blog, we saw that storytelling is useful in every one of the nine major activities of KM. However, that is mostly due to the role of storytelling in human communication generally. Also my reasoning was very much based on a very general definition of stories, so while my conclusion may be correct, an analysis of which types of stories are most important in each KM activity category still needs to be done.

References

Firestone, J. and McElroy, M. (2003) Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann.

Firestone, J. (2000) "Knowledge Management: A Framework for Analysis and Measurement," White Paper Prepared for Executive Information Systems, Inc.,
Wilmington, DE, October 1, 2000, Available at: http://www.dkms.com/white_papers.htm.

Mintzberg, H. (1973)"A New Look at the Chief Executive's Job," Organizational Dynamics, AMACOM, Winter, 1973.

An Exchange on The Limits of Storytelling

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 21:57:37 GMT

L'allegro (Thomas Coles, 1845)

Storytelling and Problem Solving: Part 2

In my last blog I analyzed the role of storytelling in problem solving. I concluded by saying that KM's justifiable enthusiasm for stories and storytelling should be tempered, in the area of problem solving, by an equivalent enthusiasm for critically assessing competing stories, because our stories are conjectural in nature and could easily be false. I proposed that we should pledge to cultivate a critical attitude toward them, keeping in mind that if our stories survive our best criticisms they are more likely to provide a better basis for decisions. In this blog I will further emphasize that position by posting an exchange between Steve Denning and myself that is recorded in messages 1497 and 1501 of the AOK list serve group.

I'll begin with Steve's statement in point 5 of his reply to a number of posters.

Steve: 5. "JOE FIRESTONE'S POSTINGS ON NARRATIVE AND KNOWLEDGE: I won't give here the detailed response that Joe's lengthy and helpful postings deserve. I'll just make two points.

First, Joe concludes that story is essentially good for pretty much everything except the weighty task of Knowledge Claim Evaluations. In this I would agree with him: analysis is a better tool than narrative for evaluating the truth of some supposed piece of knowledge. Narrative has many strengths, but sorting out the wheat from the chaff isn't one of them."

Joe: "To have your agreement on this greatly increases my confidence in my reasoning about it.

You also said:"

Steve: "Second, Joe's underlying assumption seems to be that knowledge" is the gold standard and that nothing else is worth a damn. I find this assumption more problematic. In the world of, say, the physical sciences, where what was true yesterday is almost certainly going to be true tomorrow, this is a sound approach. But in the world of human affairs, tomorrow may not look at all like today, and in organizations, the principal issue is what to do tomorrow, about which there can be no certain knowledge. It's in dealing with tomorrow that an approach rooted in yesterday's verified knowledge, and constrained by yesterday's axioms, and dominated by analytical thinking that flows from that knowledge and those axioms, has been shown to be so lacking."

Joe: "My assumption is not that knowledge is the only thing that "is worth a damn". It is that "knowledge" is biologically unavoidable, and that it is developed through a process of problem recognition, developing tentative solutions, and then eliminating the errors in them. The only question is how well we will do the job of performing these three activities.

I think that story-telling is very useful for developing tentative (and alternative) solutions. It is a very old and honored human technique for doing that. But once the stories are told, and even if they are wonderful stories, we still have the task of trying to eliminate the errors in them; of trying to make the stories as strong as they can be so that the knowledge they carry does not fail us. The physical sciences and the world of human affairs are not different when it comes to the need for critical evaluation of the stories we tell in both spheres. If anything, criticism is more necessary in the area of knowledge claims about human affairs, so that we don't act on what are obviously false knowledge claims.

Moreover, regarding your critical comments about analytical thinking and yesterday's verified knowledge, I, don't believe that knowledge claims can be "verified" in the sense I believe you have in mind. I do believe, however, that knowledge claims can be criticized and that we can distinguish among them according to how well they meet our tests and criticisms. I also think that even though analytical thinking in the Social Sciences has been far less successful than in the Natural Sciences, the lack of such thinking and uncritical reliance on intuition and authority has had even worse results. And that we see those results around us in the corporate world and in Government every day. So while, I believe in intuition, in story-telling, in unfettered imagination, and in artistry, I also believe in analysis, in logic, in rationality, and in criticism. All of these are our faculties and they are all equally human."

Steve: "Narrative is often a better way of exploring possible futures and their implications, and certainly needs to be part of the toolkit. Verified knowledge is obviously part of the picture but it isn¹t the whole ballgame when it comes to innovation in human affairs."

Joe: "As indicated just above, I don't think error elimination is the whole ball game in any field. Inquiry is a mix of the creative and the evaluative, and so is innovation. I think one problem with KM as a field these days is that it is out of balance. There is tremendous emphasis on novel techniques and experiences for generating knowledge claims, but very little concern and emphasis on how claims, once generated, will be tested and evaluated. This is a great mistake, and in calling for its correction I am not denigrating story-telling, collaborative spaces, mind mapping, communities of practice, or any of the techniques we currently value because they free up our thinking. What I am calling for is the recognition that the results of using these and other techniques stops short of Knowledge Claim Evaluation, and that our task in solving problems is not done until we've completed that activity as well."

Steve: "6. DETECTING THE FALSE NARRATIVE: I agree with John Barrett that there is no reason why narrative should be more likely to be false than abstractions, and so I disagree with others who advise against using narrative because it might be false. If anything the presumption should be the opposite: narratives are typically specific to individual situations and can usually be verified in various ways. Abstractions are typically more general and are more difficult to verify. We may believe that all swans are white because no one we know has ever seen anything but white swans, but then one day we may find that there's another upside-down part of the world where swans are black. In human affairs, generalizations are even more difficult to prove than narratives and even more likely to be false."

Joe: "I don't think abstractions are true or false. Abstractions are concepts. We use them in statements. The statements that include them are true or false. And stories are not free of abstractions, even if they are about specific events. When stories are told we must be aware of the generalizations that are implicit in the stories and we must be aware of the abstract concepts that these stories contain. You said there was no reason to believe that narratives are more likely to be false than abstractions. I would not put it that way. I think the comparison is between narratives and more formal knowledge claim networks that express theories containing abstractions. And I think that while it is true that narratives are not more likely to be false than theories, in theory, it is also true that in practice we are likely to treat theories differently than we do narratives. When we use theories we are likely to compare them against each other, to view them as competing, and to criticize them in an effort to see which is the stronger. But when we have narratives, we are likely to use them to try to sell and to provide support for a point of view we favor, and we are not likely to use them to test and to evaluate and to determine whether our point of view can survive our evaluations.

You also said:"

Steve: "In practical terms, the issue boils down to whether we are going to be intelligent about our storytelling or not. Refusing to learn what works and what doesn't work in this field isn't all that smart - in fact, it's the antithesis of knowledge management. Refusing to do it because of the risk of misuse is a bit like saying we won't give people hammers or allow them to fly in planes because hammers and planes can be used as weapons rather than for their intended, constructive use."

Joe: "I quite agree. The remedy is not to prohibit story-telling or to refuse to learn about it. It is to learn more about it and to subject narratives to Knowledge Claim Evaluation.

You also said:"

Steve: "We are a storytelling species."

Joe: "With which I also entirely agree, but I must add that we are a criticizing species as well. And as I pointed out in an earlier post, the evolution of language was accompanied by the evolution of story-telling, which, in its turn, was accompanied by the evolution of criticism, so that we could eliminate the errors in our stories.

Best,

Joe"

Colonizing KM?

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 19:09:58 GMT

Keelman Heaving Coals by Moonlight, (J. W. M. Turner, 1835)

Has KM Been Done? Part 3
Commentary on Dave Pollard's Blog on Social Networking (continued from Part 2)

The Exchange: KM Failure or Conceptual Confusion?

The thread running through my commentary in Parts 1 and 2 is the idea that Dave's blog and his position that KM should be re-invented as Social Network Enablement, emerge from considerations that do not dwell heavily on the nature of either Knowledge or Knowledge Management. As a result, his analysis and proposal about KM's future is not grounded in a clear idea of what KM is about, how it is distinguished from other forms of management and how anyone can evaluate whether a new initiative is or is not a KM initiative. This issue emerged again in the following exchange on the AOK list serve:

In response to my statement:

"Mark and I think that the value propositions of KM are:

Enhances ability to satisfy demands for new knowledge

Enhances rate and quality of organizational learning and innovation (sustainably so), and

Enhances organizational capacity to adapt

Enhances corporate governance by elevating Knowledge Processing to the level of a fiduciary issue

The difference between our value propositions and yours are very striking."

Dave said:

"Yes, they are. My experience at E&Y (and others in leading knowledge organizations have told me their experience has been similar) is that your KM value propositions, which were also E&Y's for many years, simply have not been realized, despite the efforts of a lot of bright minds and the expenditure of millions of dollars. And it's not just a matter of not being able to measure this 'value' -- users tell us bluntly that KM has not delivered on any of these promises, and they're not convinced it can or will."

And I responded:

Dave, I'm afraid this is going to get us back into the importance of conceptualization and measurement again. My view is that the millions that have been spent on KM have not been spent on it, but rather on Information Management. This has occurred because our "best and brightest" believed that they could do KM and have a positive impact on Knowledge Sharing without being very clear about the nature of either "knowledge" or "Knowledge Management" and how they are different from information, information management, quality management, content management, collaborative management, etc.

"Let's not worry about it, they said. No one in the last 2500 years has been able to solve the problems of epistemology, so let's not discuss them. Let's get away from theory. Let's be 'practical' and just take all of these new tools and techniques and call them KM and see if they work". But the consequence of this attitude is that:

(1) we're not very clear on when something we're doing is KM in contrast with knowledge processing, or information management, or information processing, or collaborative management, or content management, or many other kinds of management, or just good 'ole' business activity, so how can we (or our users for that matter) tell whether "KM' has had any impact?

(2) we're not very clear about whether we're sharing "information" or "knowledge", so:

(a) How can we tell whether our knowledge sharing programs are successful?

(b) How can we tell whether or not our lack of success is due to our sharing falsehoods (poor practices) and representing them as knowledge (best practices)? And:

(3) we're not very clear about how we measure the impact of KM, so how can we tell whether it, in the presence of competing activities has a positive or negative impact? Let's say, for example, that KM has had a positive impact during a particular time period, but an ERP intervention had a negative impact; if we're not even sure what KM is, how can we disentangle those two? And, if the same enterprise is "fooling with" KM, ERP, Data Warehousing, CRM, Quality Management, and God knows what else, all in the same time period, and we're not even sure what KM is, how can we possibly say anything about its impact?

In another current post, you named a number of tools that you said "epitomized" KM in organizations today. And, of course if those were really KM tools I'd agree that projects using them would certainly not deliver the value propositions I listed, and I'd say let's reinvent KM as something else because it's just not working. But, that's just the point, I think that's the old KM, not the New KM.

I think the New KM is different because it does offer clear notions of "knowledge" and "KM", can distinguish between KM and other forms of management, can distinguish knowledge from information, has a clear conceptual idea of what KM impact is, is developing metrics, is developing project and program methodology, does know the difference between IT applications that support key knowledge and KM processes, and those that don't, and has a normative vision to fulfil KM's value propositions. So, my intention is not to persuade people to replace KM with something else, but rather to persuade them that experience with KM has taught us a few things about the foundations of our field and now we're ready to come back with different ideas, different tools, different techniques, and much better results. People may or may not accept this view, but win or lose, we will doing KM, and not "Social Network Enablement".

Next, you responded to a question of mine as follows:

My question: "If we don't know what knowledge work is, how can we know if we are improving knowledge worker effectiveness?"

Your response: "If the user, i.e. the knowledge worker's 'internal customer' says that the knowledge worker is doing great work, then to me the argument about whether it qualifies as 'knowledge work' is not terribly important."

And I responded:

Dave, your statement of the KM value proposition implies that the distinction is important. If so, then my question holds as stated. If not, then you won't mind me restating your value proposition as: "improving worker effectiveness". Stated this way, it's very clear that this value proposition is not specifically related to Knowledge Management, but to Management, more generally, and you and I are not talking about KM anymore at all, so we have no disagreement.

That completes the account of my commentary and exchange with Dave Pollard about Social Networking Software and its relation to KM. This exchange along with a number of others I've had over the past three years, raises the question of whether formal interventions identified as KM "interventions", "projects", "programs" and "endeavors", are really examples of "KM practice.

Has KM Been Done?

In other words: Has KM Been Done? This is a trick question. Of course, KM has been done. KM is a natural function in human organizations, and it is being done all of the time in an informal distributed way by everyone undertaking activity in order to enhance knowledge production and integration activity. But whether formal interventions claiming the label "KM" are instances of KM practice is another question entirely. To answer that question, we need to have clear, non-contradictory ideas about the nature of knowledge, knowledge processing, and Knowledge Management. And to have those, we need to get beyond the notion that we can do KM by just doing anything that may have a positive impact on worker effectiveness while calling that thing "KM".

Instead we need to recognize that the immediate purpose of KM is not to improve either worker effectiveness (though it may well do that) or an organization's bottom line. Its purpose is to enhance knowledge processing that solves problems and to enhance the diffusion of these solutions, in the expectation that such enhancements will produce better quality solutions, which, in turn, may, ceteris paribus, improve worker effectiveness and the bottom line. And when we undertake KM projects, we must evaluate the contributions of our interventions to the quality of knowledge processing and knowledge outcomes. That means tough, precise thinking about knowledge processing, knowledge, and the impact on these that our interventions are likely to have.

The question I am asking here is whether KM practitioners are, in fact, providing this tough, precise thinking as a basis for KM practice, or whether, instead, they are "practicing KM" by helping fields or techniques such as Information Technology, Content Management, CRM, Social Network Analysis, Story-telling, Communities of Practice, and "Knowledge" Cafés to "colonize" it? I don't propose to answer that question now, but just to raise it and to suggest that my friendly exchange with the perspicacious Dave Pollard points to at least one case where there is not only a tendency, but a proposal, to substitute the means of social network enablement, for the end of high quality KM practice. Are there other cases you can point to? If so, I'd be interested hearing about them, and together we can perhaps address the larger question of whether such conceptual displacement is not so widespread that we can conclude that, generally speaking, at least, KM as a formal endeavor has, indeed, not yet been done.

Should We Reinvent KM as SNE?

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 15:55:31 GMT

Owentsia Hunt Ball -- Chicago (1904)

Has KM Been Done? Part 2
Commentary on Dave Pollard's Blog on Social Networking (continued from Part 1)

KM, Social Network Management (SNM) and Conceptual Drift

You then went on:

"Four important unanswered questions:

1. What role can Social Network Enablement and social software play in enhancing individual and organizational learning?"

Social network enablement and social software can provide a stronger foundation for more intensive and connected social interactions. However, this may not have a uniformly beneficial effect on knowledge processing and its outcomes. Much depends on the underlying social psychological preconditions in the organization receiving such software.

If mistrust and division, are present to begin with, SNE software may produce greater integration within conflicting groups and factions and may lead to an increase in inter-group conflict within an organization. Moreover, it is not clear what impact either decreased or increased conflict would have on knowledge processing. Much would depend on the initial state of conflict in an organization and the context of the SNE intervention. I think one thing is fairly certain, however, the impact of SNE and social software on knowledge processing will be beneficial in some respects and harmful in others, and it will be one of the concerns of Knowledge Managers to track the impact.

"2. How do you measure and reward contributions to a network (a) by full-time knowledge workers (people in the organization, like researchers and help desk staff whose sole value is contributing to the network) and (b) by network 'players' outside the organization?"

This is an interesting question, but it is not clear that it is a KM question. Isn¹t it a Social Network Management (SNM) question? Also, the question implies the desirability of introducing a formal incentive system to "reward contributions" to a social network. But this assumes that it is desirable to reinforce participation in the network beyond the reinforcement provided by participation itself. This may be unwise, because it involves a managerial imposition of a perceived desirable outcome on the network. Enabling the network with software is one thing; manipulating the incentives to participate in it is another. If we want to take advantage of natural tendencies to self-organize, we should avoid the second.

"3. How do organizations equip and foster networks without unduly controlling their actions and membership and therefore crushing them?"

Very carefully. And the real question is, how do Managers, Knowledge and otherwise, equip and foster networks without impairing the organization¹s ability to adapt and remake itself by incenting or imposing behavior that the organization taken as a pattern would not incent? I think the answer to this question, is that managers should equip and foster networks, and then do whatever else is necessary to enable people to use them. After that, managers must trust to people themselves to use their social networking tools to do their jobs including solving the problems that occur in the course of doing them.

"4. How do we capture summaries and abstracts of organizational conversations that occur in other than written form (voice-mail, teleconferences and meetings), so that the blog record of networks is complete?"

We wait for the technology that makes it convenient to do this. Until then, we do what we can with what is in the written record.

Of these four unanswered questions, only the first of them relates to either knowledge processing, or KM directly. I think this illustrates where too great a focus on Social Network Enablement and Social Software will take us, namely away from KM and into Social Network Management.

One of the continuing problems in KM is that of "conceptual drift". Since the foundations of KM as a discipline are relatively undefined and we are in disagreement over what we mean by Knowledge, KM, and the distinctions between Data Management, Information Management and KM, as well as distinctions among a number of other basic concepts, we find ourselves subject, from time-to-time, to claims that KM "really is", or should be "reinvented as" (take your choice): Quality Management, CRM, Data Warehousing, Organizational Learning, Collaboration Management, Library Management, Information Management, Human Resource Management, Communities of Practice, Content Management, and now Social Network Enablement. I think such advice is incorrect, and, thus far, at least, always based on a superficial account of the nature of KM. In fact, it is because those who offer such proposals do so without a careful analysis of "knowledge" and ”Knowledge Management" that their ideas often initially seem plausible.

Even though I don¹t agree with your suggestion that we should re-invent KM, I do think that Social Network Analysis is important for KM, and Social Network Enablement and Social Software are important trends that we should incorporate into KM interventions as appropriate and necessary. But as with every other KM intervention alternative, tool, or technique, both before and after we undertake projects that use SNE, we should try to assess what the impact of our intervention will be or has been, as the case may be. And to do this, what we really need, on an urgent basis, is a better network of concepts, indicators, and metrics that will allow us to talk more precisely about the direct impact of our interventions on knowledge processing and Knowledge Management, as well as their indirect impact on other organizational outcomes (for which better metrics may already exist).

Lastly, I hope you don¹t consider this or other posts I¹ve offered in this AOK session as hostile to you or your work. Actually, I¹m very favorable to Social Network Analysis as a perspective, and I think you¹ve done a great job with your blogs and the contributions you've made here. I¹ve offered my posts, because in many respects, my views are different from yours and both of us may benefit by exchanging communications on these differences. I¹ve tried not to use any ad hominems or unsupported assertions in what I¹ve written, in hopes that you would see this in the way I intend it, as an attempt at discussion.

In Part 3 of "Has KM Been Done?" I'll finish this series of blogs with an exchange between Dave and I and a preliminary consideration of the question providing my title for the series.

KM and Strategy: Once Again, The Contradiction

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 04:43:20 GMT

The Fifth Plague of Egypt (J. W. M. Turner, 1800)

More On Knowledge Management and Strategy

I'd like to thank Olaf Brugman and Jack Vinson for their comments on my blog post about Knowledge Management and Strategy. I am very interested in the parallel between the view of The New Knowledge Management (TNKM) and Rudolf Steiner's work of 1919, and I agree that one implication of what we are saying is that, as Olaf says: "knowledge development should not be subordinated to - or monopolized by - economic life (be it corporate or societal". I also agree very much with his statement that:

"Economic reasoning and decision-making cannot solve all social issues, and it shouldn't. However, to be able to move, as a society, towards a better version of society, we need all three impulses that make for change: coming from economic life, rights life, and cultural (= knowledge and feeling) life. And economic and bookkeeping logic should not be the only one governing our knowledge development."

And I agree, as well, with Jack's observation that:

"I think Joe's point here is that knowledge management can serve much more than strictly the goals of individual businesses. In this light, I also begin to hear the strains of Debra Amidon and others, who argue that the "innovation superhighway" should serve the public good for everyone, not just the companies who have bought "KM solutions.""

As important as the points made by Olaf and Jack are, however, I don't think the important ideas that KM transcends (1) economic life and also encompasses rights life and cultural life, or (2) the goals of individual businesses, should overshadow the main point I was making. It speaks directly to those who believe, unlike Olaf and Jack, that KM should not transcend economic life, or the goals of individual businesses.

Once again, that point is: even if your company's strategy is strictly focused on only its own economic goals, it is still true, nevertheless, that if you want to achieve these goals continuously and on a sustainable basis, you should implement an autonomous KM function that is not aligned with current strategy, but rather with a KM strategy of enhancing knowledge processing. Keeping the three-tier model in mind, and also my previous blog posts entitled "All Life Is Problem Solving" and "Organizational Problem Solving", here is another, shorter statement of the key argument leading to the conclusion that there is a contradiction in practicing KM and aligning it with strategy.

(1) Strategy focused on economic goals is implemented through business processes which use already created knowledge including strategy iself.

(2) Knowledge use is not specifically a knowledge process. Rather it is part of every act of decision making and of every pattern of actions constituting a business process.

(3) Knowledge Use Management is therefore every manager's job, Knowledge or otherwise and it is not what I mean by KM.

(4) Organizations, including profit-oriented companies, are complex adaptive systems. In such systems the outcomes of routine, rule governed processes based on previously created knowledge, frequently deviate from the objectives and goals of the system. This creates a need for adaptation (and an epistemic problem) that must be fulfilled by problem solving (or knowledge or learning) processes.

(5) These processes are used to produce new knowledge that, in turn, is applied in re-inventing business processes so that the deviation of their outcomes from strategic goals and objectives is less or is entirely eliminated. The knowledge processes of knowledge production and integration are the organization's way of problem solving and producing new knowledge that it can use to adapt.

(6) Among the possible outcomes of new knowledge production and learning is creation of new strategic knowledge that modifies or replaces the goals and objectives themselves and that evaluates the old strategy as too costly, impossible to implement, or simply non-adaptive relative to the organization's economic goals.

(7) New strategic knowledge of this sort is often essential for organizational adaptation and for the sustained attainment of its goals and objectives through time, and therefore knowledge processes and the knowledge workers who implement them must have the capacity to produce it when necessary.

(8) Organizational Knowledge Management is the set of activities and processes that maintain and enhance the knowledge or problem solving processes of organizations, including the capacity of knowledge workers to implement them.

(9) If KM is aligned with strategy, it must focus knowledge processing on solving problems that arise, by viewing them as problems of implementing strategy, rather than as problems of strategy itself. Thus, if KM is aligned with strategy, it should pursue policies and programs that discourage inquiries criticizing the current strategies it is aligned with, or that inquire into whether those strategies are valid.

(10) But this view of KM, a logical implication of its alignment with strategy, is in contradiction with (6). KM cannot be both aligned with current strategy and also committed to enhancing the organization's capacity for sustainable problem solving and adaptation, since enhancing that capacity includes enhancing problem recognition and problem solving involving current strategy itself.

(11) Therefore, since there exists a set of organizational activities, a function, that can enhance the organization's capacity for sustainable problem solving and adaptation, and we choose to call that function Knowledge Management, it follows that it (KM) cannot be aligned with current strategy, but must be independent of both its dictates and of the authority of those whose function is to both implement and formulate it.

In short, KM is about more than implementing economic goals, it is about maintaining and enhancing the capacity to adapt, which in turn requires other goals, as Olaf says, cultural goals and rights goals (See Excerpt #1 from The Open Enterprise). And why is this so? Because complex adaptive systems such as organizations are not about only one thing, not even a thing so important as profit or economics. They're also about culture, politics, social networks, communities, people, values, ethics, and goals in each of these areas. And they're also about the knowledge necessary to pursue these diverse goals, and the knowledge represented by goals, objectives, culture, strategy value claims, and ethics, that are produced by such systems as they re-make themselves in co-evolving with and meeting the challenges of their environments.

So, in the end, it's not at all surprising that adaptive functions of organizations, including problem solving and KM, are about more than just serving the economic goals or strategies of organizations. Rather, they are about change and the capacity to change themselves, and so they must transcend and check other executive functions of the organization, lest they freeze its pattern in a way that makes it too rigid to withstand the winds of change.

Conceptual Drift in KM

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 21:28:02 GMT

Rain, Steam, and Speed (J. W. M. Turner, 1844)

Has KM Been Done? Part 1

In March of 2004, David Pollard served as the Star Moderator in the Association of Knowledge Work's (AOK) Star Series. Many subjects were covered during the very fruitful exchanges of Dave's tenure. One of my posts (message 1484) was a commentary on one of Dave's blogs called "Social Networking, Social Software and The Future of Knowledge Management." In this blog, I'll first reproduce (with a few minor revisions) a good part of my commentary, then supplement it with another post (message 1498) recording an exchange between Dave and myself on KM Value propostions; and then I'll discuss the significance of these posts in suggesting the question: "Has KM BeenDone?" This first of three installments will cover the portion of my commentary dealing with the issues of "KM's failure" and Dave's proposal to reinvent it as Social Network Enablement.

Commentary on Dave Pollard's Blog on Social Networking

KM's Failure?

Dave,

In your blog on "Social Networking, Social Software and The Future of Knowledge Management." you said:

"In most organizations KM is epitomized by the corporate intranet, the extranet, community-of-practice tools, sales force automation tools, customer relationship management tools, data mining tools, decision support tools, databases purchased from outside vendors, and sometimes business research and analysis. In other words, it's certain specialized technologies and information processing roles, with a thin wrapper of "knowledge creating" and "knowledge-sharing" processes.

Most of the organizations that have implemented KM bemoan their people's inability to find stuff, the lack of demonstrable productivity improvement, the complexity of the technology, and the absence of significant reusable 'best practice' content."

I agree with this characterization, except that I would replace the word "epitomized" with the phrase "perceived as epitomized". The difference is that whatever the perception may be, these tools are not KM tools, either singly or in combination. And their identification as KM tools has been due to a failure among KM practitioners to clearly specify the key concepts and scope of our discipline and its precise relationship to various tools and techniques associated with it, by those who seek the "halo effect" of KM.

Some of us have been warning for at least 5 years now, that continued failure to carefully specify the central concepts and scope of KM as a discipline would lead to its discredit due to just the sort of misperception you¹ve described. But throughout this period,"practical" people have contended that theory wasn¹t necessary and that what we should be doing is to get on with the use of the"practical" techniques and tools of KM, without bothering to consider whether they are, in fact, KM tools and techniques at all.

Again, I disagree with the view that you expressed in another of blog advising people not to worry about what they mean by "knowledge"and "KM", but to be concerned only with the impact of theirinterventions on the effectiveness of knowledge workers. It is exactly this sort of view that has led "practical" people to identify the above tools and techniques with KM, and to bring KM into disrepute due to people¹s association of it with the often less than impressive results of interventions using them. KM should be associated with the performance of policy and program interventions that reflect a careful conceptualization of what it is and what kinds of interventions it involves. It should not be associated with interventions that use the latest "flavor of the month" IT fad in thoughtless ways, while labeling such interventions KM.

KM is More than Social Network Enablement and Its Needs Exceed the Capabilities of Social Software

You then said:

"Now along comes Social Networking and Social Software, also with its adherents from academia, consultancies, and IT. Beneath the torrent of hype and theory, it may reveal an important truth about KM, business, and how we learn: Social networks can provide the essential context needed to make knowledge sharing possible, valuable, efficient and effective.

What are 'social networks'? They are the circles in which we make a living and connect with other people. . . . If we were to 'reinvent' KM as, say, Social Network Enablement, what would change?"

I believe in the importance of social networks and social software. The foundation of much of KMCI thinking on KM is a complex adaptive systems framework that emphasizes the transactional and social networking character of the organizational system (See, for example, Excerpt #1 from the Open Enperprise). We believe that it is in the context of such networks that organizational behavioral processes, including the knowledge processes of knowledge production and integration (including knowledge sharing), arise. In addition, I also agree with you that "Social networks can provide the essential context needed to make knowledge sharing possible, valuable, efficient and effective."

In spite of my agreement on these two points however, I don¹t agree that KM should be "re-invented" as "Social Network Enablement". I¹ll explain the reasons why I think your suggestion goes too far below, beginning with a consideration of your analysis of what would change. You say:

"Intranet as connector and link harvester: The intranet would become a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository. It would become a 'link harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality."

This change is certainly positive, and when someone has a problem, it is useful for acquiring information, to be able to identify the people who are propagating knowledge claims and who will be able to provide you with other valuable knowledge claims if you make contact with them. But upgrading our ability to acquire information is only a first step in generating new knowledge and solving problems. Furthermore, to be really useful for making new knowledge, our knowledge claim "harvesters" need to go beyond merely identifying connections to people. They also need to harvest the knowledge claims and meta-claims about their performance that are associated with the people and their previous activities.

Without being able to access the content of knowledge claims and the record associated with their continued use, we don¹t have what we need for good Knowledge Claim Evaluation, and without good Knowledge Claim Evaluation we cannot have effective KM. In my book, Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management (EIPKM), KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, I¹ve outlined the requirements and architecture for the Enterprise Knowledge Portal (See,Chapters, 5, 6, 10-11, and 13), an IT application that would provide the sort of "intranet" functionality needed. You say next:

"Decentralized content, with blog as surrogate for the individual:
Content would shift from centralized, shared databases to personally- or
team-owned databases, journals and stories, where the owner(s) provide
essential context. (See my post on The Weblog as Filing Cabinet ). Each
individual's subscribable, personally-indexed Weblog would be a
surrogate for the individual when s/he's not available personally.

Again, while you¹re on the right track here, blogs are too low in functionality to fit the requirements of KM. The kind of surrogate we need to support knowledge production and knowledge integration is an"avatar", an intelligent agent representing the individual to the organization. The avatar would not only maintain the individual¹s sharable content, but would also maintain cognitive map representations of the knowledge claim networks expressed by the individual. The knowledge claim networks would also record the meta-claims about the knowledge claim networks expressed in previous work. It goes without saying too much, I hope, that the content maintained by the avatarwould provide all of the context for knowledge claims we could possibly ask for.

Avatars would not only represent individuals to their social networks, they would also be in constant communication with those social networks. Their analytical functions, combined with those of other avatars and with widely distributed intelligent server-based Artificial Knowledge Managers in the organization, would analyze and produce models of the patterns of knowledge claim networks and meta-claims of teams, groups, communities, and the organization. The results of these analyses would be available to every avatar and every individual to provide context for their own decision making, which in the end would be based on their own cognitive maps and values and their interpretations of their organizational roles and obligations. Again, I¹ve described the requirements and architectural considerations for such avatars in my EIPKM book (Chs. 6, 10-11, and 13).

Avatars would also provide the ultimate functionality, for "having it your way", as you¹ve advocated in another blog. That is, the individual¹s own cognitive map, always maintained and updated bythe avatar could be used as the navigational interface for the individual. What the avatar represents, of course, could be immediately edited by the individual, if he/she thinks the avatar is mistaken in its representation.

You then said:

"Decentralized security, organizational boundaries blurred: Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, the same way regardless. Security would be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up subscription access to their blog categories correspondingly."

I very much agree here and also note that such security capabilities are envisioned in my EKP construct (see chapters 10-11 of EIPKM).

"Greatly enhanced weblog functionality, emphasis on access: Today's blogs are not nearly enough to fully enable social networks. They need much more connectivity functionality. A user should be able to call up a visual of their own network, or the network of expertise corresponding to a particular subject. The tool that does this would operate much like a search engine except it would retrieve people (and links to people) instead of documents. It would also have to aggregate various means of access to those people: e-mail, voice-mail, video and whiteboard, meeting scheduling, IM, weblog subscriptions and commenting, and new means of access just being developed. And it would need some mechanism to create a 'biography' of the user by automatically summarizing the total content of their weblog."

I agree as far as you go. But, as I¹ve indicated above, I think we need to go further. The visuals must be of knowledge claim and meta-claim networks, which, of course would include social networks,workflow networks, and any other knowledge claim networks expressed in the organization in question.

"Enhanced organizational change functionality: The exhaust from theincreased connectivity could be browsed and canvassed to identify organizational change opportunities. Popularity indexes could pre-sage emerging business issues needing management attention, and could be used as a key part of the performance evaluation and reward process, and to identify de facto organizational thought leaders and potential strong recruits. It could incorporate Tipping Point functionality to propagate important ideas, Power Law analysis to identify and spell employees suffering from 'network overload', and perhaps even new "Network Traffic Analyses" to identify communication logjams and disconnects. Intriguing, and perhaps a bit scary."

All useful, but again, not enough, and not enough precisely because it doesn¹t deal with knowledge claim networks and their associated meta-claims explicitly. Especially, in this last change, you are not talking about KM but offering a hypothesis about the anticipated effect of social networking enablement, completely apart from its effects on knowledge processing.

In contrast to your specification for SNE software, the EKP construct I've specified in my book is Social Network Enablement Software Plus. That is, the "Plus" includes support for all of the areas of Knowledge Processing specified in KMCI's Knowledge Life Cycle framework, including and especially Knowledge Claim Evaluation. In addition it supports the main activities of KM identified in our KM Framework as well. So my contention is that KM needs Social Network Enablement Software Plus. And that an important part of the Future of KM will be the development of a real EKP, rather than the EIP applications that have misappropriated that label today; or, alternatively, the same application using another name such as a Distributed Knowledge Management System (DKMS), or a Knowledge Base Management System (KBMS),or an Artificial Knowledge Management System (AKMS). The name is ultimately not important, but the functionality for supporting problem formulation, knowledge production, knowledge integration, Knowledge Management and knowledge use, is.

My next blog will cover the part of my commentary dealing with KM, Social Network Management and Conceptual Drift.