Keith June 25th, 2010
“Nearly 60 percent of projects aimed at achieving business change do not fully meet their objectives.” – IBM, 2008.
Why does this happen? As many working in Knowledge Management and related fields understand, it’s all about people and complexity. Organisations are increasingly dependent on people and what they know in order to operate successfully in today’s environment. It is no longer sufficient for organisational change to be driven by a small handful of people – there is no monopoly on ideas.
This is the topic of the presentation I delivered last Wednesday night at the Melbourne KMLF. The slide pack is now available on SlideShare.
I have posted on this topic here before, and delivered an earlier version of the presentation at trampoline.
Key points in this presentation are:
- Recent insights into effective organisational change.
- The impact of complexity and the importance of engaging people.
- Creativity and the wisdom of crowds.
- Social Media – the power of trust and openness.
For more background on the topics covered, here are some links to the material referenced:
For more on the change management tools and approaches mentioned, see these sites:
- Cognitive Edge - David Snowden’s site – for Cynefin and complexity tools.
- Anecdote - Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk’s site – for business storytelling, change and anecdote circles.
- Gurteen Knowledge - David Gurteen’s site – for knowledge cafés.
- Change Management Toolbox – Michelle Lambert’s site - for the change management cards..
- The Organizational Zoo – Arthur Shelley’s site – for the book The Organizational Zoo and the matching zoo cards.
Finally, see “How to organise a children’s party” on YouTube.
Keith May 7th, 2010
As part of some training material I have been writing for a client, I have revisited some related work I was engaged in some years ago. One of the other authors I was working with then wrote a chapter on culture. This work quoted a piece called Cultural variations in the cross-border transfer of organisational knowledge: an integrative framework, by R S Bhagat and others, from a 2002 edition of the Academy of Management Review.
This work describes national cultural patterns, and how they affect knowledge sharing. Here is a simple summary diagram I have put together of the four basic types they described:
Both types of culture in the left column are independent and individualist, and predominantly Western.
The top left quadrant is the domain of the rugged individualists. They are mostly found in France, Germany, the UK and USA. These people see each other as unique, and accept inequalities. Thus they can naturally accept a social class structure. They tend to hoard knowledge, and see this knowledge hoarding as power. They like theoretical analysis.
The horizontal individualists in the bottom left domain see themselves as equal in status with each other. Bhagat et al state that they also have “a relatively high tolerance for ambiguity and complexity”. They are mostly found in Denmark, Sweden and Australia. This is of particular interest, and will be discussed further.
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Keith March 15th, 2010
For some time I have been working with a team of highly-skilled consultants in a business consultancy group called “The 3e Factor”. A new website for the group has just gone live.
The 3e Factor is an innovative management consultancy specialising in business transformation, leadership development, and recruitment services, with its head office in Melbourne, Australia. Our focus is: Transforming Strategic Thinking into Reality by Developing Corporate Capability.
Have a look at the site, and browse the capabilities of the consultants working with the group.
Please feel free to contact me or The 3e Factor if you would like to know more.
Keith October 24th, 2009
I’ll be off to trampoline in just a few hours, with the intention of doing a presentation on “The Idea Monopoly?” I have blogged on this topic before, and you can see the slide pack on SlideShare here.
The topic of organisational change – and getting people more involved in it – is something I have been becoming quite passionate about for a while now. This presentation at trampoline will be the first time I have presented on the topic. I intend to develop this work, and its linking themes, in time to come. I am currently playing with a new term for this – “orgsourcing”. You heard it first here!
Keith November 13th, 2008
Talking Cock (v.): A Singaporean term meaning either to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter.
- The Coxford Singlish Dictionary
Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of traveling to Singapore on a number of occasions to speak at conferences. I have greatly enjoyed the experience - both the conferences, and wandering around Singapore as a tourist. I have met some fantastic people there, and have greatly enjoyed the culture – and the food!
Singapore is a land of contrasts. It is richly multicultural, with all public signage in four languages. The population is predominantly Chinese, yet most of the public institutions are as British as they were before independence. It has earned a reputation as a non-democratic nation, yet the country is alive with art and innovation, and not in the least like a totalitarian state. I feel safer walking around the streets anywhere in Singapore than I do in some parts of Melbourne.
Some would like to portray Singapore as a place where freedom of speech is suppressed by the government, yet Singapore is now becoming increasingly open. One friend I have made in Singapore is Enrico Varella. Enrico introduced me to a fantastic local web site – Talking Cock.
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Keith March 4th, 2008
The Human Dynamics lab at MIT has developed some interesting “surveillance badges”. This has been brought to my attention by Andrew Mitchell. New Scientist Technology blog reported this January that these badges “recognise each other using infrared, then record your speech, note your distance from other people, and track your movement.” With these badges, researchers can “monitor people going about their day – working, meeting, eating, going out and sleeping. The devices record where the wearers go and how fast, their tone of voice, and subtle details about their body language.”
These badges have been apparently been used for some interesting investigations into free will. By tracking individual movements and personal interactions, MIT researchers found that “we are more instinctual and a lot more like other creatures than we care to think… a good 90 per cent of what most people do in any day follows routines.” Interesting…
In a more recent application, as New Scientist reports, “… one of the researchers, Ben Waber, has blogged about handing out the badges to delegates meeting with their corporate sponsors.” This application was used to develop and display a social network map, visible to the participants. “… over the course of the day, more people became connected within the network as they met more people.”
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Keith July 23rd, 2007
A highlight from KM Aus – Michel Bauwens on “Peer to Peer – the new paridigm for social innovation” (my paraphrase):
“There are only two things wrong with the world today. We treat nature as if it was infinite; and we limit the immaterial world by imposing artificial scarcities (such as copyrights). Let’s swap this around. Let’s swap material accumulation for intellectual and artistic accumulation.”
See more on Michel’s site.
Keith May 3rd, 2007
“When I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean.”
– Humpty Dumpty.
There has been further discussion at actKM about the definition of “knowledge”. One contributor gave this definition: “Knowledge is solutions to problems”. I disagree with this definition – I see it as too narrow.
This seems to ignore the use of knowledge in creativity and innovation, but it was further stated that these can also be viewed as just a different form of problem resolution. Joe Firestone stated that “non-routine creative learning is a response to a problem.” I struggle to accept this point of view. This is stretching the meaning of “problem” a long way. I do accept that creativity in the business world may be seen to be more limited than in pure art. (Is it always? Should it be?)
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Keith February 6th, 2007
Shawn has just posted an interesting article at Anecdote about the problem with Melbourne’s train system. With holidays, and other interruptions to my normal commute, I haven’t been using our train service much since before Christmas. I’m not looking forward to riding the rails again this Friday!
As Shawn has explained, this seems to be more than a mechanical problem, even if a very complicated one. As soon as you have people involved, it potentially becomes complex.
Back when I worked it the pure IT space (on a system called “EDG”), I had an interesting problem-solving experience. The problem – and the ultimate solution – ended up being fairly simple, but actually finding the cause was a little more complicated. However, the whole situation became more complex, due to people being involved.
I was fairly new to the team at the time, but had already become fairly familiar with the system. However, I was still being treated as the “junior”. Wiser heads than mine had already solved major problems on EDG; they could solve this one too.
The unusual aspect of this particular issue was that two different things started going wrong at about the same time. The senior people set to work, going through the usual fault diagnosis procedures. Some were addressing one of the symptoms; some were working on the other. I wasn’t called upon for my (fairly limited) experience.
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