You cannot make people smarter.

Curiouser and curiouser! raises some unresolved Klogging issues:

• Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way?
• Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control. 
• Does klog makes it easier to control you?
• As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive?
• Are big-KM vendors missing the point?

I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it.

[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.

[Mathemagenic]

» Thanks to [DG] for putting me on to Mathemagenic.

"You cannot make people smarter."

I believe this to be true.  However I also think that:

1. Not every organisation believes that, e.g. the amount of money spent each year on training that doesn't work.
2. Not every organisation cares how smart it's people are (no matter how much they spend on investors in people logos)

All that downsizing.  All those drives for efficiency at any cost.  They have created environments of paranoia and hostility where there is no interplay between individual and organisation.

My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them.  Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management.  I don't want to be a part of that.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

The question of whether you can make people smarter or not isn't the point. That suggests that only smart people can benefit from knowledge management or other initiatives? I don't think that's the point, although I've been known to be less than smart about things myself over the years :).

I think you absolutely can demonstrate and be a model for behaviors that are more effective than others. That it happens rarely in formal training or that some organizations pay only lip service to learning are secondary issues.

There are lots of issues tangled up under the broad rubric of knowledge management or knowledge sharing. That's one of the reasons that progress has been so difficult to make. Weblogs in general, the notion of klogs (whatever we end up calling them), and the recent discussions going on in blogspace are all contributing to my developing a much deeper understanding of the issues.

It's Alan Kay's old point - point of view is worth IQ points (the actual number being in dispute as is the relevance of raw intelligence to the discussion). Maybe it's a philosophical point. For me, if you're still alive, you're learning. If you're learning, you're at least potentially getting smarter in some practical sense.

Granted most organizations do a piss-poor job of helping people learn intelligently (I include schools as organizations in this context). That doesn't mean that those organizations and those individuals who can do it should quit trying.

As for insecure and fearful managements, I suspect that the market will take care of them for us although perhaps not quickly enough. Call me a Pollyanna, but I think healthy organizations dominate statistically and economically. But as the norm, they are less visible in places like the media. We seem to be much more inclined to see and hear stories of trauma and problems than ones of normalcy and health.

4:39:57 PM •  • comment  

If taken in an organizational context, successful KM depends in part on people sharing the right information. And because different individuals have different skill sets and different experiences, it's unlikely that one individual would know what another would find valuable. This compounds Phil's comments: not only can't you dig ideas out of people's heads, but you wouldn't necessarily know which ones you would want to pull. (Which I guess means knowledge isn't like pornography: you wouldn't know it when you saw it.)

One of the advantages to blogs is that they make it easy to simply jot down some thoughts. You don't need to give too much thought to what is valuable and what isn't - not only wouldn't you know, but value to one individual is worthless to another. The key is to ensure a simple, reliable way for capturing the ad hoc thoughts. Blogs make capturing this info about as simple as it can be.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog][emphasis added]

Rick adds some more insight to the question of getting knowledge shared in the first plac e so that you might have an opportunity to manage it in an intelligent way.

To me this discussion is finally beginning to address the first issues that need to be thought about - how do we make sure there is something worth managing. It's easy and all too tempting to gloss over that issue, but my experience has been that it's critical.

4:20:29 PM •  • comment  

Uncovering the implicit. From Sébastien Paquet and Lilia Efimova ... some interesting insights as to why people blog and why some professions are better represented than others e.g. educators, journalists, software developers, librarians, lawyers and knowledge professionals. As Sébastien says in his [original posting] on the subject :

I think the commonality has to do with uncovering the implicit.

And as Lilia [adds] :

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier easy to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things...

I think they are on to something here - some people because of their mindset "can't help but blog" while others will "never get it" or never find the time or the motivation to do it. And that's not a judgement - it simply reflects the diversity of human nature and that can only be good [] [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

One of the great things about using a news aggregator like Radio's is the frequent juxtapositions of interesting posts. This was next to the item from Phil Windley I just posted.  Too much of knowledge management thinking assumes that the relevant knowledge is just out there lying around, waiting to be swept up and managed.

I find that creating knowledge is hard work. And, I've found that keeping a weblog is one absolutely essential tool for helping me catch ideas before they slip away and then working to develop them into something useful.

10:01:32 AM •  • comment  

Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads.

Dave McNamee is doing a good job on his weblog of narrating his work and keeping his co-workers updated about where his head is at on any given day.  Good work Dave!

I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed.  I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads.  They must be expressed to be used.  [emphasis added]

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Phil Windley is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads. I wish that more executives in organizations were as wise as he is. Nothing about knowledge management or knowledge sharing can accomplish anything until you focus on this.

9:56:20 AM •  • comment