Perspectance

Is your organization characterized by conversation silos? I’m betting most organizations are structured as departmental hierarchies that coincidentally keep conversation to a minimum. The focus is probably on getting assigned work done. Therefore conversation, especially between employees across functional team lines and even more so, up and down the “chain of command” is likely viewed as interruption, unnecessary, and typically a waste of time. Can anyone give me an example of an organization that behaves otherwise?

One might be hard-pressed to imagine a more structured organization than the US Army, and so I read with interest LTC Pete Kilner’s description of consequences when one aspect of the C4P community design model (last post) is missing or weak:

If conversation is missing, knowledge may transfer but is unlikely to be generated. If connections are absent, there will be fewer contributions of content and conversation, and the contributions will have less context. If information context is absent, the community is prone to misinterpret content or apply knowledge inappropriately to new situations. Finally, without purpose, knowledge-building will founder.

As Jay Cross continually points out, 80% of what people learn occurs through informal means, yet companies spend 90% of their education budget on formal training. This is a complex problem, but the formal training, conversational silo, limited cross-boundary connection approach constrains knowledge capital to a transfer model, and ignores knowledge generation.

This gets to why it is so crucial to foster conversation in today’s economies. I’m intentionally using the word “economies” to highlight the value proposition inherent in communities of practice design for organizations. What business today still really thinks that knowledge transfer is sufficient? What educator today believes this? Knowledge sharing, building, and most importantly, knowledge generation is necessary to compete in today’s rapid pace of change condition.

Which of the five parts of your knowledge-building community is weakest? Is knowledge generation even occurring? Is it valued?