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?

I’m excited about Ning Networks! I’m excited about the level of help available among people who’ve started social networks and landed there with their questions and answers, and that I have learned the power of social learning. I’m excited that Ning makes it easy to pull a site and group together with little or no technical expertise, then turn over keys to the back door, basement, closets, and attic with the click of a button. There is so much I want to explore and do with our new site, and I just expect to be able to do it with a few searches of the Ning resources. 

Why was I writing this again? Oh yes, because the Ning page provoked it! So there’s this Primer….written by developer Diego, and I can see that if I read all the way through it, maybe a few times, I will LEARN all kinds of stuff about not only Ning, but the principles of database theory in general. This excites me so much I had to stop reading and capture what is happening here.