Hand-out at the ICM Knowledge Management Conference
Los Angeles, September 29-30, 1997

by George Pór

Communities of practice imitate nature where meaningful beginnings are frequently hardly perceptible. This story is a story of such a beginning.

September 22, 1997, I posted a series of slides in the Knowledge Garden of Community Intelligence Labs' (CoIL) public website. Those few slides were the pinnacle of 15 years research and consulting work focused on knowledge systems, communities of practice and the relationship between the two.

My intention was to walk my talk and practice what we, the consultants at CoIL told so many times to our clients, and what Cindy Johnson of Texas Instruments summarized with the words of Woodrow Wilson: "We should not only use all the brains we have, bur all that we can borrow."

In that spirit, I invited the fellow speakers of this conference to visit our website and comment on my slides from the unique vantage point of their experience. Sharon Oriel of Dow Chemical responded to my invitation and sent me an e-mail message with very valuable insights, for which I am thankful to her.

Part of CoIL's web-based Interaction Center, we have an ongoing dialogue forum called "Workplace Communities", in which managers from various companies, consultants, business professors, and other organizational professionals discuss such topics as:

• Tacit knowledge, relationship and business metrics
• Building a corporate memory
• Trust building at work
• Coaching people in the organization
• Growing and sustaining virtual communities in business

As an experiment in creating a small-scale knowledge ecosystem in a short time, I sent an e-mail message to the 150 visitors of Workplace Communities, inviting them to review my slides, then join me in a conversation in our asynchronous online forum.

In response to that invitation, between 22 and 29 September, 37 people visited the forum; 20 of them posted 55 messages, 27 of which contained specific feedback and suggestions related to my presentation. The pages following this one are excerpts from our online dialogue. The interactive, online version of this conversation contains a number of hyperlinks, allowing users to follow more than one order, in which information is organized on the Web.

I integrated a number of the points they raised in the new version of the slides, which is not included in this binder. The ideas that I will introduce you today are my original ideas improved by the collective intelligence of a group of people living in the different parts of the world, most of them I have never met with.

Besides providing me with the benefit of their experience and insights, they have also engaged with each other in conversations about what matters to them, related to knowledge and communities. What started as a one-time feedback-gathering mechanism, our online conference became the cradle of a vibrant network of conversations.

If you want to get a sense of what it takes to support similar, project-focused collaboration in your organization, free from the constraints of distance and scheduling meetings, join us at: http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/iacenter/wpcom.shtml. When prompted, enter a username and a password in lowercase, then go to conference item #19 on Knowledge Ecosystems for Communities of Practice.

If you are interested to confer about other issues of knowledge management, we recommend to visit a sister community called "The Knowledge Community of Practice" that you will find at: http://www.byoc.com/asp/Community.asp?id=2358

Finally, if you want to access the always-current version of the "Designing Knowledge Ecosystems for Communities of Practice" presentation materials, or download it so that you can replace the outdated version contained in the conference binder you received at the registration, go to: http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/dkescop/index.shtml

Knowledge Ecosystems for Communities of Practice

22-SEP-97 16:48 George Pór

Welcome to a critical dialogue about the framework and distinctions presented in Designing Knowledge Ecosystems for Communities of Practice, and their implications for wholeness and meaning at work. Three days ago, on Sept. 22, when I wrote the opening sentence of this conference topic above, I couldn't anticipate the outpouring of inspiring ideas and lively conversations that have started occurring here, in just three days. All I wanted was some feedback about my materials so that I can refine them, and assist the birth of a knowledge ecosystem that I can demonstrate at the conference.

Inspired by our fledgling virtual community of inquiry, now I offer to continue facilitating this dialogue beyond the date of my presentation at the ICM conference on Knowledge Management, in LA. In fact, I will invite interested attendees both at the LA meeting, and at the Knowledge in Action conference in Tel-Aviv, October 29-30, to join us here. I suggest re-defining the purpose of this conversation, as follows:

Support a virtual community of inquiry exploring the manifold relationship between communities of practice and their knowledge ecosystems.

Please post here your thoughts about the suggested purpose of this conference item, and also your comments, questions, and any workplace story you may have about communities of practice and how they co-evolve with their body of knowledge.

George,

Looking at your slides, I thought of a trip I made to the Inner Hebrides Islands of Scotland a few years ago. In visiting the remote caves of early Christian hermits I was struck by the power of ideas to organize individual lives and communities. It was sobering to consider the effects of the ideas of a long dead Jewish mystic in the middle east on the lives of these fourth century Celtic fishermen and subsistence farmers turned religious hermits on these barren islands.

This setting caused me to first consider an ecology of ideas that exists super-ordinate to our individual and collective lives. I had a glimpse of the ebb and flow of ideas, and how a concept might lie protected in an isolated valley of minds, or on a piece of parchment where they survive successive waves of other ideas. Much as the seminal genetic observations of Gregor Mendal survived until they found fertile ground centuries later.

I was struck by the impression that the thrust of evolutionary experimentation is now focused on the ecology of social systems that humans have created. While other social species make do with one social system humans have created a whole ecology of social systems, many of which are businesses. Evolution was much slower when change was limited to the media of genetic transmission via biological reproduction. Many generations of a species would need to transpire before a genetic change could sink or swim. But with the thrust of evolution focused in the ecology of human social systems the media of change became language and ideas and many experiments can happen and live or die in one generation.

As I think of these things I am struck by the responsibilities of those who design knowledge systems for communities of practice. One of these responsibilities must be to protect and encourage diversity. All of present animal life on land evolved from what was probably a very ugly little creature that first awkwardly slithered around in the mud at the edge of a shallow estuary. What a tragedy if an alien had stopped by earth at that time and stepped on the creature because it appeared worthless. So may it be on much smaller scales as we design communities of practice that seek to coax ideas out of turbid estuaries and onto the dry land of our conscious minds.

Early versions, whether they are primitive amphibians, Celtic Christian hermits, or designers of knowledge ecosystems probably need to be able to tolerate a lot of muck and uncertainty.

Joe Paul

Joe,

Thanks for sharing your reflections. I have particularly appreciated your call to designing knowledge ecosystems for diversity, and join you in recommending it as a design principle to all ecosystem designers.

I'd like to ask your permission and the permission of all colleagues who will post their comments here before September 29, to let me quote them in the transcript of this conversation that I'd like to give to the attendees of the ICM Knowledge Management conference in LA, thus illustrating a simple collaborative knowledge process that integrates website, online dialogue forum and face-to-face conversations.

George: Good luck on your presentation upcoming. I am curious that you are going to address hundred knowledge managers, since no two or three people I talk with have a clue what a knowledge manager might be. You are on track in suggesting the ecological approach but miss on a couple of bases.

Unless there is some compelling reason (a regular assignment, addicted to learning, or a crisis) most informal communities of practice do not exchange information, knowledge and experience quickly enough or often enough to do any organization much good. Of course if one tries to "manage" those communities they cease to function.

I think you will find as you investigate this further that the structure of work still needs changing and that most organizations have not a clue as to how to organize an open communications and information system that supports the creation of new knowledge.

The work of Fred and Merrelyn Emery shows us how the structure of work can be changed through open and democratic means. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow tells us about "good" addiction to learning, that is being autotelic. And... well the rest will have to wait for a bit.

Good start over all. I wish you well as you continue your search. Ned Hamson, senior editor, The Journal for Quality and Participation

George, I mentioned to you elsewhere that I am making a presentation in October entitled "Differences that Make a Difference", concerning development of "Organizational Intelligence" in family owned businesses. In the event that it is of use my working definition of Organizational Intelligence follows...

Organizational Intelligence: The capacity that allows an organization to change data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into action, action into institutional memory, and institutional memory into guiding principals, processes and structures. This capacity to develop intellectual resources in this way is based in the organizations ability to form relational links within the organization and between the organization and the surrounding environment.

There is a bit of a parallel between this definition and your "Data to Wisdom" curve.

I am looking forward to hearing about your presentation.

Joe Paul

Joe, your definition of organizational intelligence as the capacity that allows change, dovetails with Mike McMaster's description of how to increase organizational intelligence:

"The degree of connection, of distributed accountability and of access to the meaning making activities of the organization in relation to the whole population is the key to increasing or decreasing organizational intelligence." - The Intelligence Advantage

To me it means that to boost organizational intelligence--therefore performance and long-term viability--a company must:

• Create conditions conducive to multiplying the meaningful connections within and among communities of practice

• Allow projects and initiatives rise from the grassroots

• Invite wide participation of corporate citizens in making decisions that affect their work life

In light of Joe Paul's definition of organizational intelligence and McMaster's description of how to increase it, what else do you all see as necessary measures that responsible management should take to ensure that the company will thrive in chaos?

George, I believe one of the most important actions for survival in a fragmented and turbulent market is an open communication system between all stakeholders. There is a need to connect more closely to the market, learn from your lead customers, gather innovations and adaptive uses of your product and services.

Market intelligence can be gained in many ways, forming a dedicated secretive internal team is perhaps the least effective in dynamic markets. Responsible Management is all about relationships more that science, it is trust, bonding, leadership, example, motivation, securing alliances, reciprocating goodwill, building social capital. It IS NOT optimization, prediction, or even simulation, not systems nor process nor ROI, it is people.

In a chaotic world its all in the links not possession, relationships not assets, goodwill not liquid reserves.

So I echo Mike, build the links.

George,

You asked "what else do you all see as necessary measures that responsible management should take to ensure that the company will thrive in chaos?"

Coincidentally, I was looking at your paper earlier today entitled, " The Quest for Collective Intelligence" and was particularly interested in the section on the Community Nervous System. I think that responsible management needs to coordinate the development of both the wet (human) and dry (digital) aspects of the Community Nervous system. Either bringing in an individual who is skilled in both areas, or better, a team with a specialist in each area.

There is a place in the northern Rockies, on the Continental Divide, where on three occasions separated by years I have crossed paths with a heard of Big Horn Sheep that let me get very close. On the last occasion I quietly walked up behind one of the rams and swatted him on the butt. It took my breath away to watch the entire herd (that was spread out over several acres) jump as if they had all been swatted at once, and then stampede up the mountain. That was a responsive community nervous system.

Joe

I'm very grateful to be a part of this conversation, even if primarily as a lurker.

As a librarian turned "Knowledge Manager" (6 weeks ago) I'm convinced that the term Knowledge Management is suffering from a great deal of misunderstanding but perhaps this is only in my own organization.

George, I'm curious about what the people who invited you to speak had in mind. Do they want validation? Provocation? Insight about what makes KM work? After all, your presentation has a great deal of heart in it, and most organizations are not too interested in their souls, despite the recent spate of books with that word in the title.

I work in a consulting environment. The need here is being expressed primarily in terms of organizing files and documents to make them more accessible to people in the form of templates and shortcuts to work product. Very little discussion or attention is being paid to how the organization might be different if we created an environment for enriching our resources. As a consequence, I'm not even being viewed as a librarian (which is my background) but rather as simply an inventory clerk. Attempts to discuss a vision and create a plan are being met with statements about "producing visible results." This organization has put many thousands of dollars into developing two in house systems, one of them LotusNotes based that are not being used because people don't understand the WHY of sharing information and they haven't had adequate training. Because so much money went into technical solutions, it's now a situation of force fitting into the existing platforms which people are resist to using. A very different concept from George's Knowledge EcoSystem, which is rather pure and ideal in concept.

I had an interesting conversation with a woman who works in the Business section of the Library of Congress. It turns out that she is one of the people who designates "subject headings". She's been putting Knowledge Management under Organizational Learning, but partly because there's quite a bit being published and partly from meeting me at a social event, she's rethinking the issue and trying to figure out how to "name" it. If anyone has insight on this, please email me privately.

Kind Regards, Rivkah Sass

Greetings everyone,

This conversation is helpful for me.

I am on a "Body of Knowledge Task Force" of an interdisciplinary professional association made up of academics, advisors and consultants from four tribes; law, finance, management, and the social sciences. We are a community of practice organized around work with family owned businesses. I think we have about a thousand members internationally. The Board of Directors of the association has defined Body of Knowledge development as the purpose of the association. In service of this purpose the work of our task force seems to have three dimensions.

1-To provide cross-disciplinary access to relevant information and knowledge from the existing Bodies of Knowledge of the four discipline areas. This is so we can understand each other better. We work in the same territory but have very different maps. The big challenge here is to provide both inter-disciplinary breadth, as well as intra-disciplinary depth.

2-To create a context for increasing self knowledge. In working with human systems the agent of change brings issues to the client relationship that can facilitate growth or aggravate existing problems. Primarily we look at the issues from our own personal histories that could make us less effective.

3-To create a context for Emerging Knowledge. Bringing these particular tribes together around the first two items in this list creates a lot of interesting ideas and relationships. Our conference in '98 will be an "Open Space" event, and will be primarily in service to this 3rd dimension.

It seems to me that one of our main responsibilities as an association is to create a hospitable environment, rich content and links, and ease of access. This conversation and context is helping me to think about ways we can enrich the association's offerings. I can see that we need a more highly developed "nervous system" and that will be on my agenda when I meet with the board next month.

Joe

George,

My first reaction to your slides is to say "Thank you" for providing a holistic context in which conversation about using knowledge and community in commercial enterprises is more than just intellectual exercise. I appreciate your perspective that neither knowledge or community has any objective standing (at least this is true when we have conversations about how to 'manage' them), rather they are tools that people use to raise their effectiveness.

On a more tactical level, a few specific comments.

Slide 2; You talk about the value proposition for COPs, but there's no explicit mention of the ad hoc nature of communities, especially at their inception. I would argue that the first value realized from a COP is that it provides a 'space' for ideas, goals, theories, etc. to be scoped out and then developed. The process typically works something like this....A group is working on Problem A. They understand that Problem A really is composed of sub-issues a, b, c... At some point, many of the other components of these sub-issues fall away as they are determined to be not relevant. However, it happens that some of those discarded sub-issues catch the attention of someone who is working on Problem B, which can either be related to Problem A or not. The point is that identifying the common nature of the sub-problems is only possible because of the work being done on the original problem. When established community members work on the new problem, invite others to work on it and escalate it to a higher level of awareness within the community, the COPs value is most dramatic.

Slide 4: KM is an Oxymoron: I COULDN'T AGREE MORE; THANK YOU FOR SAYING IT OUT LOUD. Pundits are still arguing about whether KM is about technology or processes. I heard E&Y's CKO argue that it's about processes. I wonder how he, a bright guy, missed the point....

Slide 5; I want to argue with the word 'conversation', but I sense that it really just needs to be defined in a context of interactions, communications, between different mediums.

So, that's my constructive commentary. Hope it is helpful. BTW, the Triple network graphic is especially good. I'd like to suggest that the interaction between Knowledge and People be set in a context such that the greater the interaction, the greater the value. What do you think?

Regards, Abby Kutner

Hi,

I'm new to this area, although I have been to this site before and I heartily agree with most of the attitudes toward knowledge management that are expressed here. I work with a small, 4-person knowledge *sharing* team at NCR Corporation. I am based at our HQ in Dayton, Ohio, but other members of my team are in Seattle, WA, and Hartford, CT, and we serve NCR's increasingly virtual associates all over the world.

I particularly like George's notion of a "Knowledge Ecosystem" - it's a metaphor that captures the emergent character of knowledge. It also carries with it strong connotations of nurturing, not managing, and the interconnectedness of things.

My team has, for the last two years, emphasized the interpersonal approach to knowledge sharing, in contrast with the information processing view which, understandably, is very popular at NCR (a computer manufacturing and service company).

Unfortunately, most of our work (and its rationale) is behind our company firewall and not available to participants in this discussion. I have put some short descriptions on my external home page.

I look forward to learning a lot from the sponsors of this site and the participants in this forum.

Regards, Verne Morland

P.S. I noticed earlier in this discussion a few references to a "Corporate Shaman." It reminded me of an article I wrote for New Management magazine (USC) in 1984 titled, "Lear's Fool: Coping with Change Beyond Future Shock." You might want to check it out.

Dear George,

I read through your slide, and I thought each slide was good, but what was perhaps missing, and that is what you will have to bring in as you talk, is the integration of these points into a coherent story about what is means to know or for an organization to be interested in knowledge. You asked for a few questions, and so my questions mostly have to do with integrating your slides with one another.

How are communities of practice and your various lens related? What is the relevance of your curve to both topics? Are knowledge and wisdom really just a recent discovery, or is there underneath a story about management theories catching up to reality?

So the point really is to recognize the way knowledge already works, and then build design frameworks that do justice to that understanding. I think that is the power of the notion of knowledge ecology: a concept that reflects the way the world works anyway.

Etienne

Hello - I see you all.

I am just entering this community and conversation for the first time, but want to share my thinking so you can also see me.

I am struck by Joshua's last contribution: Joshua in 19:26 - It seems to me that "Body of Knowledge development" is not the end but rather a means to an end. In building on this, my comment is: Is there really ever an end? Or do we continue to interact in other ways, creating new vectors of shared knowledge as an emergent, autopoetic system?

Related to slide 9: In my little niche of the corporate universe, it appears that we are still wearing our "Descartian" glasses when we frame "knowledge management" as the structure to help us advance into the "knowledge era" - we are still trying to frame this CAS in mechanistic and fragmented model that ignores the human aspect of the contribution. (My boss originally thought that knowledge management was a great idea because it allows us to "suck" the knowledge out of people's heads rendering them perhaps lifeless/disposable as a corporate asset). So the sense of "people" which drives the whole structure, is often relegated to a lesser position of importance than output or technology. (Especially so in my techno-centered corporation).

General reflections; The conversation has been thought provoking and extremely useful for me as I move to a new role as Manager of Human Resources research. I will take Mike McMaster's criteria for increasing organizational intelligence to heart, as I work toward taking a static database of facts/figures and creating a knowledge ecosystem capable of generating collective intelligence, through ever changing constellations of conversation.

Hi everyone. I've just introduced myself in the appropriate conversation and, while I haven't had time to read in depth and appreciate the whole conversation that has preceded me here, I can't resist a few comments triggered by the richness of what has gone before. If I cover what is already "twice plowed ground", I apologize.

There were some early references to "managing in a chaotic world". I do not consider that chaos is the state we need to deal with. Rather, the state that I see as most relevant is complexity. A simple way of saying this is that in complexity, phenomena can be understood with simple principles. In chaos, they cannot be understood but only, and at best, statistically "understood".

One of the central themes I've seen is "How do we increase organizational intelligence?" I use as an analogy the human system. What increases an individual intelligence will increase an organization intelligence. I consider the major source or at least primary requirement of increasing individual intelligence is participation in a community. This implies to me that organizations need not only encourage these communities and their interactions but that organizations need to participate in communities that are larger then themselves. These include industry groups, universities and various larger social activities.

Knowledge Management, for me, an an oxymoron in the same way that the idea of managing people is one. That is, there are aspects where the term applies but they are small compared to the possibilities. The language of knowledge management reveals this physicalist, static approach that goes with "management". For instance, we don't talk about "knowledge repositories" much when we talk about human beings. Instead we use more dynamic terms such as memory which is active and non-local. In fact, "memory" is pure creation in a human being.

The question has been asked a number of times in this conversation, " What are some indicators of intelligence creating activities?" Specifically for connections, grass root initiatives and wide participation in decision making.

I would go lightly on the connection measurements or indicators. They can be registered and displayed but could often lead to missing the point. Rather, I recommend creating practices that encourage this activity. The simplest one is to constantly ask the question, as though it was important, "What new connections have you made?" This will focus attention in the write place. A measure might be to have significant new relationships registered on a company basis on public display.

The "grass roots" approach, which I prefer to call "emergent initiatives", can easily be registered by providing a place with some active encouragement for public display of projects that are started. Again, I recommend practices to encourage this. Try creating a conversation around a 360 feedback process that talks about how many of these are initiated and what conditions are helping and inhibiting.

Regarding wide participation in corporate decision making, I am not sure that this need be what it seems. One way to have it happen is to create policies and practices that demand it - say that a forum of a certain size is required before a decision of a certain importance is made. This would be interesting to combat the command and control mentality that might exist. However, I am more inclined to have public forums (mainly electronic) where the dialogue and process can be observed and, ideally but not necessarily, where comments can be made regarding that dialogue and process.

I think that the key issue here, from the individual point of view, is that these processes are transparent and accessible - not necessarily that I've had a say. Corporations tend to be too large for that. From a corporate point of view, it is the information and understanding that is wanted rather than "input to decisions" if that refers to power or personal influence.

I hope this has been sufficiently respectful of what has gone before and contributes to what is to follow. I look forward to future participation in this dialogue.

Mike

Adding to Mike's comments on corporate decision making ... I think the aim is not so much to have gobs of people involved in making a particular decision. Rather, i think what we want is for gobs of people to have the opportunity to influence the thinking framework within which decisions are made - often made by individuals or small teams who are very close to the action related to that decision. It's a subtle but important difference. This difference suggests designing environments for rich conversation more than for efficient choice-making.

George and CoIL associates, thank you for creating and furthering such an important inquiry! A few points come to mind (which is the purpose of this forum).

Thank you George for the distinctions made with slides from your presentation. They certainly help me reflect on KM and KE and what is the reality of my world (not only work).

An example that relates to your presentation is a project Wayne Reeves and I are currently working on at Sun Microsystems. It is the Java Migration Project. This team of talented people are charged with moving Sun's 300+ internal computer programs and applications into the Java language paradigm. Wayne and I came in to assist in creating the central web site as a communication/creation hub and to initiate a practice of knowledge development related to ongoing lessons learned. Your explanation of the Knowledge Ecosystem certainly applies and is helpful in thinking about what else can be done to support this evolving consciousness.

I can go into more detail at another time, but it is wonderful to see this community using the web site and email to ask questions they were "afraid" to ask a year ago and provide assistance openly that moves the project along. As Peggy Zetler mentioned, "knowledge occurs when understandings are collectively experienced".

It takes a while to develop the sense of community and the trust that is essential. Along the way and once created, Mike McMaster's question "What new connections have you made?" is key. And that can be taken at many levels!