DINK - Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
We are really a team of teams at work. No one can claim to work on his own, more so in this era where data and information flows quite effortlessly across. Yet we very often continue to think that the KM issues center around the individual and the organisation. I would like to propose that we insert the individual, teams, and the organisation as the 3 levels where we will need to study carefully to the extent that we are able to strengthen for knowledge transfer.
As individuals, we should be looking at growing our personal capacities for generating knowledge from information. There were early academics who presented strong arguments for the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom progression, and I support the ideas behind such a categoriastion. However, it is too simplistic to imagine that one could progress to Wisdom as a next and natural step in his quest for knowledge, especially when the uncertainty factor increases as it so often does in our workplaces today. So there are no wise men at work!!
There could be some very knowledgeable people at work. These are folks who are very experienced, and who possesses some sort of an almost mystical knowledge bank from which they appear to draw on solutions to difficult questions. Now there has been a huge amount of academic studies on expertise that seeks to dispel the knowledge bank notion. So we should be more aware that in this day and age, the chances of finding a knowledgeable person at work diminishes, and therefore we must take necessary steps to build our capcities to be able to convert information into knowledge - knowledge that is useful for us to do our work.
But of course we all know this..... But this is what reinventing KM is really about. KM in the future will involve a lot more than just the traitional create-disseminate-embed (Nonaka, 1995) orientation, or the knowledge market concept (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Even Communities of Practice (Wenger, 2001) become debatable in the growing uncertainty and information revolution at work.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
CRITICAL THINKING & KM
If you cannot think staright, then it would be extremely challenging. Why? Because one would not be sure whether the issues, ideas and thoughts that is so easily available these days on the internet are actually purposeful or useful for the question at hand, assuming that we are happy with the authenticity of what is available.
Richard Paul and Linda Elder's work in the field of Critical Thinking can equip us better train ourselves to think and reason critically. To me, the ability to do this is foundational to knowledge construction. Up to now this ability, which is clearly not something that anyone is born with, is largely gained when one seeks and achieves higher education levels. A simple example is that an MBA or MSc equips a person with higher cognitive abilities. Then again, there are many PhDs whom I have met who have left me wondering about their ability to think, despite their training in scientific rigour.
I have had the pleasure in attending one of the Foundation for Critical Thinking conferences 2 years ago where there was a 2-day training workshop thrown in. The 8-step model is available from their site - I like it because if gives me a working frame to build my hypothesis or argument on. Paul and Elder also move into traits and standards, and this is where anyone seeking to build some sort of a training package to kickstart critical thinking can immediately used these frames.
The KM Practitioner of the future will need to strengthen his/her critical thinking abilities - and this, unfortunately, is not attended to in schools and other educational institutes to the extent that it is necessary for the next generation economy. So a bit of self-help is going to be necessary as we better prepare ourself to use information to create knowledge.
Richard Paul and Linda Elder's work in the field of Critical Thinking can equip us better train ourselves to think and reason critically. To me, the ability to do this is foundational to knowledge construction. Up to now this ability, which is clearly not something that anyone is born with, is largely gained when one seeks and achieves higher education levels. A simple example is that an MBA or MSc equips a person with higher cognitive abilities. Then again, there are many PhDs whom I have met who have left me wondering about their ability to think, despite their training in scientific rigour.
I have had the pleasure in attending one of the Foundation for Critical Thinking conferences 2 years ago where there was a 2-day training workshop thrown in. The 8-step model is available from their site - I like it because if gives me a working frame to build my hypothesis or argument on. Paul and Elder also move into traits and standards, and this is where anyone seeking to build some sort of a training package to kickstart critical thinking can immediately used these frames.
The KM Practitioner of the future will need to strengthen his/her critical thinking abilities - and this, unfortunately, is not attended to in schools and other educational institutes to the extent that it is necessary for the next generation economy. So a bit of self-help is going to be necessary as we better prepare ourself to use information to create knowledge.
Knowledge Cafes
Let me start by saying that David Gurteen is a good friend, and each time he passes through town, I try my best to meet up with him for a beer or a meal. On his recent trip over here, we sat down in a Chinese restuarant for lunch, and the topic progressed onto knowledge cafes. Mind you, David is the father of knowledge cafes - he has successfully extended the World Cafe concept started by Juanita Brown, into the KM arena.
I sat through a knowledge cafe that he ran some years ago. At our recent lunch, I shared some of my thoughts on its potency, and what I regarded were differences in the World Cafe setup. World Cafe requires a skilled facilitator to bring out the responses from the audience through a serious of carefully crafted questions, toggling between small and large group interactions. Without a doubt, it is a wonderful approach to getting people to share. However, this is only to the extent that they want to, and I cannot help but wonder how critical it would be for the facilitator to be skilled. In life, while we might aspire to be skill facilitators, in reality we struggle.
Enter Knowledge Cafes. The fundamental principle to me is conversations. Knowledge Cafes use some of the world cafe principles, except that it is led from within and not outside. The knowledge cafe format can be used by a leader from within the group, to get people talking and to build conversation flow. This is quite different from the World Cafe intent, which one can argue is most useful when soliticiting group feedback on a topic.
I like the knowledge cafe because by its very title it requires knowledge to be created - and this means that the leader who uses this format is quite like a jazz band lead - playing his own music while cueing the rest. There will be no scripts when this is done well - therefore knowledge cafes demand a certian sense of authenticity - a key principle for leadership practice.
World Cafes require facilitators to agrregate the responses and highlight the key ones through a practice of categorising and clustering. In the knowledge cafe however, the leader summarises as he paraphrases. Now I like that very much, as at the end of the conversations, we look for the true meaning behind what was discussed, instead of listing what was mostly discussed!
I am of the opinion that we have a lot more left to learn about knowledge cafes!
I sat through a knowledge cafe that he ran some years ago. At our recent lunch, I shared some of my thoughts on its potency, and what I regarded were differences in the World Cafe setup. World Cafe requires a skilled facilitator to bring out the responses from the audience through a serious of carefully crafted questions, toggling between small and large group interactions. Without a doubt, it is a wonderful approach to getting people to share. However, this is only to the extent that they want to, and I cannot help but wonder how critical it would be for the facilitator to be skilled. In life, while we might aspire to be skill facilitators, in reality we struggle.
Enter Knowledge Cafes. The fundamental principle to me is conversations. Knowledge Cafes use some of the world cafe principles, except that it is led from within and not outside. The knowledge cafe format can be used by a leader from within the group, to get people talking and to build conversation flow. This is quite different from the World Cafe intent, which one can argue is most useful when soliticiting group feedback on a topic.
I like the knowledge cafe because by its very title it requires knowledge to be created - and this means that the leader who uses this format is quite like a jazz band lead - playing his own music while cueing the rest. There will be no scripts when this is done well - therefore knowledge cafes demand a certian sense of authenticity - a key principle for leadership practice.
World Cafes require facilitators to agrregate the responses and highlight the key ones through a practice of categorising and clustering. In the knowledge cafe however, the leader summarises as he paraphrases. Now I like that very much, as at the end of the conversations, we look for the true meaning behind what was discussed, instead of listing what was mostly discussed!
I am of the opinion that we have a lot more left to learn about knowledge cafes!
Starting Points
I have thought long and hard about starting this - and I guess in the end I succumbed to the call to share what I am thinking about, and thinking a lot about. KM has been in my thoughts these last 7 years almost daily, as I have devoted quite a bit of my time everyday to seeking better ways to understand and deal with the issues in KM. I am an academic as well as a practitioner in the field, doing both reserach and implementation.
Enough of an introduction, I think. Lets start the ball rolling. I want to point out what the President was quoted as saying in the aftermath of the Detroit terrorist scare onboard the plane - that the intelligence agencies, the community as a whole was unable to undertand and interpret the information that was available. Is this indicative of the future challenge for knowledge management?
Enough of an introduction, I think. Lets start the ball rolling. I want to point out what the President was quoted as saying in the aftermath of the Detroit terrorist scare onboard the plane - that the intelligence agencies, the community as a whole was unable to undertand and interpret the information that was available. Is this indicative of the future challenge for knowledge management?
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