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?

Did you ever have a teacher who had you write down every word you didn’t know in a new book and then go look up definitions and then use the word in a new sentence? That was one of my favorite school activities from the earliest age. When I was done, I felt so much smarter. Most of the time now, I can make sense of content in context with enough surrounding words, but once in awhile I stumble into a delectable berry patch where too many of the surrounding words are also new – but tasty.  

Such is the case with much of my reading on the Ning Developer’s Network.:

Some of the most common questions from developers new to the Ning environment have to do with the Ning Store (XNS from now on). These questions fall roughly in one of two categories:

• Mapping of relational (or more generally, traditional) database concepts to the XNS. This included questions regarding locking, concurrency, referential integrity, etc.
• Usage details. What are types? How are fields defined? And so on.

I’m not really a developer, but I am happy to be splashing around in there. I joined it and said in my profile I’m a NooB. (I should look that up.)  I’m a wannabe lots of things, one being a community developer; and because the people I know (and want to know) and work with are geographically dispersed, online is a good place to try and develop community.

Somehow, my want of bringing about community has combined with my Ms. Breakit, Makeit, Fixit approach to the world and landed me in the weeds of one after another computer science estuaries. 
Fortunately, I love estuaries- all kinds of them- every sense of them, metaphorical and tangible. As a child, I crabbed, fished, and swam in one. I’m a native of the briny edges (hmm, good blog title), which is perhaps why I’m at home adapting to new environments on my way out to sea.

I stopped reading to come write here because I noticed in the Ning Developer’s Network familiar characteristics of nurturing growth/learning environments.  

1. First, there’s Diego, believing and presenting the need for at least a little relational database theory before explaining how to do something.
2. Then, there is readable structure in the form of a Table of Contents, Intro, sections, and from a cursory look, liberal illustrations. These are great signposts that encourage me to swim out just so far, dart back, then swim out further.
3. He talks about models the reader can compare and contrast with this unfamiliar one. I particularly warmed up reading that my new learning can hook in somehow with a Network model – which I understand better.
4. Finally, there is the company of others to feed and swarm with, afforded by the discussion section immediately below the article.