Following is an excerpt from Dr. Rhem's latest book, Knowledge Management in Practice due out at the end of the year:

Social media brings the power of sharing and collaboration to the masses. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube… knowledge sharing and collaboration has become a way of life. At the core of knowledge management is knowledge sharing and collaboration and social media tools have business and government taking notice.

Social media offers organizations the opportunity of connecting with potential customers at virtually no cost. It is possible to set goals and get ROI, however you have to know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. A way to understand where you want to go is to analyze the Participatory Communication Cycle.

Participatory Communication Cycle

The Participatory Communication Cycle is leveraged to enhance the capacity of individuals and communities to sustain communication activities (Corbett, 2010). The Participatory Communication Cycle consists of assessing your communication capacity, developing a communication plan, implementing communication activities and monitoring and evaluating the results.

Assess Communication Capacity as it pertains to implementing social media is to understand the potential constraints of the proposed medium being utilized (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.), ascertain the staff needed to produce, send, and respond to communication within the perspective channel(s). The assessment should include an analysis of your organization’s legal and political constraints to social media, conventional sources and types of messages as well as communication style and scope, Corbett (2010). Incorporating knowledge management will bring needed structure and focus when leveraging the Participatory Communication Cycle.

Knowledge Management and the Participatory Communication Cycle

Knowledge management within the Participatory Communication Cycle occurs as the organization assesses and learns from the impacts of communication within the various social media outlets as dictated by the action plan. Through interaction with constituents your organization will gain valuable knowledge of issues, opinions, and perception of your product and services as well as the company as a whole. In responding to the various comments within social media concerning your organization with an attempt to answer/respond in the correct way, company representatives must have access to the right knowledge. This knowledge will facilitate representatives to respond in a consistent manner and take control of your company’s voice within social media.

Social Media, KM and the Enterprise

Social media takes knowledge and makes it highly iterative. It creates content as a social object. That is, content is no longer a point in time, but something that is part of a social interaction, such as a discussion. It easily disassembles the pillars of structure as it evolves. As examples: content in a micro-blogging service can shift meaning as a discussion unfolds; conversations in enterprise social networks that link people and customer data can defy categorization; and internal blogs and their comments don’t lend themselves to obvious taxonomy.

Social media in the enterprise has gotten the attention of knowledge management scholars and practitioners. It should mean that many of the benefits we experience in the consumer web space which include effective searching, grouping of associated unstructured data sources, and ranking of relevance will become basic features of enterprise solutions. In the enterprise for example when looking to staff a project with a certain skillset the social capabilities that will be leverage would include role, primary skillsets, secondary skillsets, number of years of experience, rating on efficiency of each skill, etc. Social media’s impact on KM will bring about more time analyzing the knowledge that is being created through social interactions.

Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is your organization’s roadmap to plot this destination. To reach your customers and potential customers successfully you need to start telling your stories directly, and do it in a way that sparks conversations, interest and action. The value proposition of Social Media for is sustained conversations that shape perceptions and attract students to enroll in programs and participate in its activities.

Reference:
Corbett, J. (2010) Participatory mapping and communication, a guide to developing a participatory communication strategy to support participatory mapping. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Washington, DC.

The examination of social media and KM is furthered detailed in chapter 3.

I've been on a roll about Learning Circles...get it circle, roll...?

Learning Circles is a peer coaching method which can be incredibly effective when done correctly.

You may have experienced one-on-one coaching, maybe executive coaching, leadership, career, or life coaching. All of these are ways in which a professional coach helps an individual discover new insights, make coherent choices, and integrate new behaviors. It can be a very powerful way to make transformative lasting change in your life.

Peer coaching takes the coaching model of discovery, insight, and action and makes it accessible to a wider range of people. It is a way to promote continuous learning and growth in an organization. That is why I call them Learning Circles.

The method is adopted from Action Learning, an adult development theory which posits that adults learn by gathering what is known (explicit and tacit), asking questions to create deeper insights, and reflecting on actions

Learning circles use the real world issues of the participants as a sort of "active case study" for exploration and action planning. When properly facilitated, Learning Circles create change as well as enable the development of trust, authenticity, and resilience in an organization.

Here's an example of an issue that one of the participants brought to the Learning Circle.

"I'm working on a major tech implementation that will change the process that many people use to order parts. The rank and file seems pretty happy with the change. They see that it will make things easier for them.

The problem I'm having is with the senior leadership, especially the director. This will require changes from everyone and the senior level is not walking the talk. The employees see that and they are losing confidence in the system, starting to talk about it as another 'flavor of the month.' This happened a few years ago with another tech system--successfully implemented but ultimately disregarded because the senior leadership never made it a priority."

This participant wanted to explore ideas for what to do to get the senior leadership on board before the project failed.

After about 12 minutes of clarifying questions and brainstorming possibilities, the person bringing this to the table talked through three ideas she felt might work and committed to action steps to take, reporting back to the circle in two weeks with observations and insights of the impact this plan made.

Then it was the next participants turn to share a challenge they were facing.

How often do you have the opportunity to share a pressing issue with a group of colleagues, have them listen to hear the deeper issues you may be missing, and offer helpful insights that may accelerate the resolution of that issue?

Whether I am designing a creative protection structure as a lawyer or designing a creative business model in my Innovation Management practice, I have found that getting the environment right really matters.  While Knowledge Management (“KM”) traditionally focuses on the framework of people, culture, process, and technology, in this brief article I hope to show that KM programs would benefit by also considering “environment.”
 
Housing KM in the right environment is essential because KM is so often disruptive and radically transformative to the ordinary course of a business.  APQC’s popular book, “The New Edge in Knowledge Management,” recognizes this fact and strongly emphasizes the importance of environment in KM.  Above and beyond communities of practice, the authors assert that successful KM programs house themselves in environments that include “supportive infrastructure, leadership and management roles, sponsors and stakeholders, a governance model, and funding.” Unfortunately, in some KM programs and much of the current KM literature, governance and environment are underemphasized.
 
KM’s neighboring disciplines of Business Process Management (“BPM”) and Project Management (“PM”) place greater emphasis on environment than KM.  These disciplines both suggest a Center of Excellence (“CoE”) as their proper homes.  BPM and PM also emphasize the “importance of positioning” the CoE with sufficient “autonomy” in self-governance as an essential ingredient to success.*
 
While Business Process Management and Project Management are neighboring disciplines to KM, innovation is the “child” of Knowledge Management.  Ikujiro Nonaka, co-creator of KM’s widely used SECI Model of Knowledge Dimensions, emphasized that “the knowledge creating company’s sole business is continual innovation.” However, advancing beyond the basic KM activities of capturing, storing, and reusing knowledge to realize continual innovation is rare.  Continual innovation requires careful design of a KM environment with sufficient autonomy.*
 
Because of KM’s transformative nature and interconnection with innovation, several innovation management frameworks should be considered when housing KM.  Among the Innovation Management literature on structuring innovation environments, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen’s model stands out as a good starting point for KM practitioners to consider how to structure KM environments.  As Christensen lays out in his book, “The Innovators Solution,” when structuring an environment for a transformative innovation, one must consider how easily the activities involved fit in with an organization’s existing work and workflows.  In companies where KM is more difficult to implement across organizational boundaries, Christensen’s matrix would suggest that a more autonomous environment is required.
 
Further insight into the concept of structuring KM environments can be gained by considering Dartmouth Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s framework for designing innovation environments based on size and scope of the KM project as described in the book “Beyond the Idea.”  The authors offer valuable best practices and lessons learned in structuring innovation environments that are directly applicable to housing KM programs in appropriate environments.
 
A full discussion of the specifications for forming (or reforming) KM environments is beyond the scope of this short blog.  However, it is my hope that KM practitioners will draw helpful analogies from the neighboring disciplines of BPM and PM, as well as from KM’s “child” discipline, Innovation Management.  Whether a KM program is housed in a “KM Center of Excellence (KMCoE), or “Office of Knowledge Management,” KM practitioners, will achieve greater success when the governance and environment for KM is carefully designed.
 
*Additional Resources:
 
For further reading on Business Process Management and Project Managment best practices for structuring environments, refer to “Building Project Management Centers of Excellence” by Dennis Bolles and “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management” by Theodore Panagacos.
 
For further reading on KM’s connection to innovation, read “The Knowledge Creating Company” by Ikujiro Nonaka.
 
For further reading on the difficult transition from KM to innovation, see Ch. 10 in “The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management” by Pasher and Ronan.Rustin Diehl is an attorney and innovation advisor, focused on organizational modeling and training with businesses, private clients, non-profits, and trusts. Rustin Diehl is an attorney and innovation advisor, focused on organizational modeling and training with businesses, private clients, non-profits, and trusts.

by Anne Marie McEwan, CEO of The Smart Work Company, Ltd.

'Change management' and 'knowledge management' are both phrases that make me very uncomfortable. To me, knowledge is personal. Certainly what we think we know is influenced by many things. This might include our own psychological dispositions that limit or enable our beliefs about our capabilities, work environments and contexts that help or hinder us as we seek to understand, and the strength of our commitment to acquire new knowledge. What I think can be influenced are the conditions where new personal and collective knowledge can emerge, and existing knowledge can be put into practice.

What about change management? We know from the last big shift in organising and working practices, when traditional manufacturing adapted to lean, quality and agile approaches that, in the words of one commentator at the time, most businesses failed their way to success. Change, as we all know, is messy. To say it can be managed is, I think, to conceal the complexity of human behaviour.

Human beings are individually complex; we are not static entities. We may well have patterns of characteristics that stay with us through our lives but what we know and believe in adapt continually as we experience life and people. Work process are the outcomes of what people do together. So if we are already complex, relationship dynamics only expands complexity, and that's before we start to take into account increasing levels of social, organisational and technical complexity arising from converging global workplace trends.

Yet despite human relationships being complex and dynamic, organisational rigidity prevails. The pull of the status quo is strong. Can change be managed? And if so, how?

Changing our approach to change

I really like Peter Fry's metaphor of trojan mice:

"Trojan mice are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojan mice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could."

He's in good company. John Hagel and colleagues in their book, The Power of Pull, talk about "small moves, smartly made" as the basis for institutional change. They say:

"These changes will be driven by passionate individuals distributed throughout and even outside the institution, supported by institutional leaders who understand the need for change but who also realize that this wave cannot be imposed from the top down."

And then there's Dave Snowden's "safe-to-fail probes":

"... when dealing with complex systems there is the need for experimentation. Safe-fail Probes are small-scale experiments that approach issues from different angles, in small and safe-to-fail ways, the intent of which is to approach issues in small, contained ways to allow emergent possibilities to become more visible."
Hagel at al. say that "going forward, individuals will increasingly shape institutions rather than vice-versa." I agree with them, which is why the book I wrote is called Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave. What I am suggesting is that people are not prisoners of their work environments, rather they shape them to suit their own purposes - as far as they are able to.

That has always been the case, though. If organisations are slow to change because of the rigidities built into structures and systems, what now makes an increased pace of change more possible? What is now key is that people are connected through the internet to a sort of giant global brain. They can find out who knows what to help them in doing whatever it is they want to do, and they can get emotional support in communities of peers who are trying to do the same thing.

Creating conditions

Let's return to knowledge management. What people need are performance environments and cultures where continuous innovation is integral to everything everyone does. People have a "yearning of learning", desire for social connectivity, and a need for self-determination.

Process innovation philosophies, which I was researching decades ago, matured from a focus on continuous improvement and eliminating waste to a broader focus on continuous innovation - questioning the status quo (Do we still need to do this? If so, how might it be done better or differently?), and building enterprise capability from a philosophy of try-it-and-see experimentation.

So rather than trying to manage knowledge, our changing world demands a rethink. Change does not only have to be of the top down variety. People who are able to lead change and build enterprise capability through an accumulation of small-scale experiments are distributed throughout organisations.

The focus now shifts to managing our own knowledge and putting it into practice. What people now need to develop are digital, networking, political, collaboration and learning skills that will let them access what they need both within and across enterprise boundaries.

To do this, they will need others to act as facilitators, information brokers and curators, coaches, provocateurs and sounding boards. They will also need work cultures that encourage autonomy and experimentation, of course with risk factors and boundaries clearly communicated. How then will the role of Knowledge Manager have to evolve? Over to you!

In our previous post, we discussed the challenge facing the KM team as the nature of knowledge becomes more fluid.  Organizations must use the tools available to their advantage.  Have you considered these tactics?

• Have team members utilize smartphones to promote knowledge transfer.  
• Design applications that allow employees to easily access information, or connect to experts through a simple search
• Create a feed that works in a similar manner as Twitter, with updates on what is occurring in "real time" within the organization, that can be acted upon quickly
• Employ a catalog or subject index accessible by smartphone
• As context becomes more fluid, and as knowledge is more tacit, consider creating a learning environment where those involved can build a massive network of databases comprised of websites, wikis, and thousands of message forums.  This will create a large scale knowledge economy.  Consider ways in which this can create an environment where members are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performance, even if they must build new tools to do so.  By doing this, these communities will be constantly improving.
• Implement a guild structure, which allows for smaller groups which self-organize.  These groups are then responsible for seeking out, testing, filtering, and distributing information within the organization.  Using available tools, such as "Google Hangouts" can allow members from around the world to converse and learn from one another in a social way, especially as there is an increase in tacit knonwledge.  In this way, they can still learn from one another through storytelling, while constantly refining their knowledge.
• Create a type of social-bookmarking system, one where users determine the content, and can add descriptions or comments to the content of others.  This type of system would include information retrievable by tag search, with content that is centrally stored, accessible from any browser, and shareable with others.

These are just a few ideas which can be implemented to more successfully manage knowledge in today's fluid environment.  Contact KM Institute for more information or to register for our training programs.