Brent MacKinnon's Public Library

Keeping learning alive in communities




By Janet Clarey | May 19, 2008






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A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. -Annie Hall, 1977







Two blogs posts, What Adds Community Value and Ning Death Syndrome a/k/a the dead shark problem recently caught my eye.




It seems we can learn some lessons from these two posts on why online communities thrive and how you can attain that in your organization. (I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be a dead shark. It’s bathing suit season after all!).




How to set up a community that most certainly will fail:



• have no activity after initial contact
• have just a couple of members
• sporadically post
• don’t have a mission
• don’t post anything about provocative issues
• don’t give it time to grow
• diverse opinions
• instant communication
• active participation
• sharing
• transparency
• quality content
• easy to use
• welcoming
• value



Sounds easy, no?

Knowledge as possession pervades most of our thinking and writing. We talk easily of knowledge harvesting, knowledge transfer, intellectual capital, knowledge assets, capturing, storing, distribution, valuation, ownership, purchase and possession when managing knowledge. This is knowledge as an object, a resource, a commodity. This is explicit, explicated, static, rigid, recorded.

Knowledge can be observed from other vantage points - consider knowledge as dispersed, community bound, emergent, ephemeral, embedded in practice, as sense-making, arising from interaction and dialog. In this sense, knowledge is acquired through participation, practice, apprenticement. knowledge is 'being' and doing, shared understandings and frameworks. Knowledge is socially and culturally  mediated, negotiated interpretation and embedded in relationships.

Knowledge, in this second view, is not a token, ownership rests within the ecology and is collective, knowing is rooted in membership, practice and being, emerges via dialog and actor to actor exchange - it cannot be extracted, captured, exchanged without critical loss of meaning, context and value. This helps explain why best practice transfer is a myth, why ethnography rather than surveys  are needed to uncover knowledge, why measuring knowledge makes no sense, why mentorship, community, relationships, trust and dialog are keys to knowledge fermentation.

Unmeetings

Open source, open space, grapevines and gossip, conversations and stories, learning spaces and learnscapes, unconferences and The World Cafe, podcasts and wikis, graphics and concept maps, complexity and community…these are part and parcel of the free-range learning I investigated relentlessly while writing The Book

Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches create meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, at minimal cost. Unconferences are characterized by:

Jay's bottom-line: Conventional meetings are events; unmeetings are on-going processes. Unconferences work because they spur relevant conversations, which I think of as the stem-cells of innovation. My summary on unconferences.

Meaningful conversation is more important than ever because conversations are essential not only for imparting knowledge, but for creating it. Knowledge flows. Imagine the power of conversation with other free range learners conducted outside one's specialty!

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People have heard that storytelling is great for dealing with tacit knowledge. They say things like, “If we could only capture our stories we could then capture our organisation’s tacit knowledge.”

This is the big mistake! Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.

In practice, this means creating spaces for stories to be told and listened to. We do it in a bunch of different ways depending on the needs and objectives of our clients.

For example, if we are helping tackle complex issues such as trust, leadership, culture change, we would create the space in sensemaking workshops.

If we need to evaluate the impact of difficult to measure initiatives we create the space using Most Significant Change and the selection workshops.

NASA creates this space for staff to listen to and tell stories in their monthly project management seminars where PMs discuss the stories collected in the their monthly newsletter, ASK.

Everyone is busy and no one will give up their valuable time to listen and tell stories. But they will allocate time to evaluate a project, tackle a complex problem or learn lessons from their colleagues.

The stories don’t contain magical solutions that we can capture, dissect and unleash. Rather they provide a language of engagement, of learning and a way to transfer what is impossible to write down and store in any database.

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