This is not an analytic blog post, nor a theoretical blog post.
I am merely passing on Dave Snowden’s observations based on his long experience of what was, what is, and what is increasingly being structured to fit with the prevailing management mindsets about productivity.
The theme of this post, and the extract below from Dave’s recent blog post, also for me resonate with Euan Semple’s The Price of Pomposity.
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[ Snip … ]
We then moved on to Richard McDermott who I’ve know for years, populariser of Communities of Practice (CoP) and it’s still his main theme. A Warwick University sponsored research programme underpins his presentation. He argues that every organisation has to balance operations, customer focus and learning. CoPs own learning and this contribute to the firm.
He is really going back to basics (or rather the 90s) here. Suggesting that back then we thought that it was the informal nature of these which worked. Argues that things have now changed, or so his research shows. Originally information connectivity was novel, now people are subject to data glut and its difficult to know where you are or what you should pay attention to.
His theme now is all about people being overwealmed so their participation in communities fell off because it was voluntary. Using the tragedy of the commons and a focus on individual learning now to make a point. I suspect he’s working towards a corporatist perspective. Moves on to suggest five questions that should be asked: (i) does the community matter, (ii) who is minding the store, (iii) staff have to be pressurised to participate, (iv) CoPs should be integrated to the organisation and (v) Communities should have a formal function, such as saving money etc.
One of the things that always worries be about KM research is that it is context free. Now the above are conclusions from current research, at the end of the KM life cycle. Organisations still running CoPs are likely to have formalised them into complements to process, and as those are the only ones to survive its nor surprising that the above conclusions are made – this is especially true if you interview the KM function. I’d be interested to see some field ethnography here. If you give people targets and appraisals that make them participate in communities, then they will. We had the same in IBM, but the real knowledge transfer took place in informal networks, the formal systems had (with some honourable exceptions) lots of compliance and the KM practice reported success to researchers and executives alike. The reality was very different.
With the odd exception the whole thing seems to be going back to the 1990s, its about information management (with KM as a subset), search engines, automation, very traditional and formal approaches to CoPs.
None of this stuff worked back then, do people really think that doing it again and harder will achieve the result?
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My note in conclusion … I do not think Dave is arguing for free-form willy-nilly anarchic exchanges, but as in any initiative involving flows and exchanges of information and knowledge, that purposeful boundaries and constraints are offered by context and objectives.
If I am wrong and he reads this, I’ll be glad to be corrected.
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