I am presenting an updated version of the Knowledge Transfer Toolkit presentation - read more about the background on this site, including this recently published article. The outline of the presentation is as follows:

Building and managing a knowledge transfer program:

How do you encourage technical experts to share their knowledge with others in the organisation that need it to do their jobs? How do you maintain currency and accuracy? This case study presentation will explain how to build a successful knowledge transfer toolkit.

Topics include:

• Encouraging knowledge-sharing behaviours
• Building a program-managed multimedia toolkit, comprising content, communication, learning and social media
• Governance – keeping content up to date
• Engaging the target audience in improving content
• Using social media principles to build trust and engagement

View or download the slide pack on SlideShare here.

We came together to talk about – and experiment with – various tools and techniques of group facilitation.  The retreat was arranged by Viv McWaters (@vivmcw) and Johnnie Moore (@johnniemoore), who had also just flown in from a couple of weeks of facilitation in the Solomon Islands and other places.

As much as it was about learning and doing stuff, it was about relaxing and having fun. I was there as Matt Moore (@engin_eer) had invited me. (Thanks, Matt!) Although I did already know some of the other people there, it was also a great time of meeting new people. It was also the first time that I had picked up a guitar for over a year – Geoff Brown (@geoffbrown3231) very kindly didn’t protest when I borrowed his every time he put it down!

Wildwood was a bit run down, as it was actually on the market, and the owner was no longer resident on site. The catering was excellent, and the location marvellous, but the nights were getting cooler, and the wood fire heating was rather short of fuel. Some of us tracked down some wood, and Geoff kindly wielded the splitter. Given my experience with wood fires at Blackwood, I got the Coonara going on the first morning there, and kept it stoked up for the duration. (For which I was christened “fireguy” by Johnnie.)

One of the highlights was the evening that I was sitting around fiddling with the guitar (or guitaring, I guess), and Johnnie suggested we improvise a song. After a bit of work, we got a chorus going, and improvised as many verses as we could as the others came into the room – and then ran away to the other end of the room as quickly as they could!

The tune was Waltzing Matilda – the best-known tune – and the chorus was as follows:

Facilitation of deep conversation.
Our congregation at Wildwood Retreat.
If we all make our way to
Deep in the Otways
We’ll have a confabulation, won’t we?

I guess you had to be there.

So what did I learn? I did pick up some facilitation techniques. But I think that I learnt more from Johnnie’s style and approach to facilitation.

Johnnie’s approach to facilitation is one that could best be called informal. Shawn Callahan (@unorder), another friend and long-term colleague there, has blogged his thought on the retreat here, with a very thoughtful piece on Johnnie’s approach. Shawn quoted this as “notice more, do less”.

I personally found this approach incredibly refreshing. After learning a few techniques elsewhere recently that place great emphasis on planning and preparation, I was beginning to feel that my preference for putting the emphasis on “making it up as I go along” was perhaps somewhat frowned upon.

Not that I don’t plan – in fact, I often plan in great detail, but I am always prepared to modify the plans to meet the need of the audience and the context at the time of delivery. (There’s a military term for this: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” – although the use of the term “enemy” is not really appropriate in this context!)

There was a strong improv theatre flavour to what we were doing – and not only in the song. As Shawn has written, the emphasis was on emergence. Emergence is what happens in complex adaptive systems – and a group of people together, involved in cognitive work and interacting, make a complex adaptive system.

One example of how complex patterns emerge is in the movement of a flock of birds.  It has been said that the birds only follow three very basic “rules”:

1. Fly towards the centre of the flock
2. Match speed with the birds on each side
3. Avoid collisions

Yet from this simple set of procedures, amazingly complex and intricate patterns of movement arise.

Improv theatre also follows a set of basic rules. Michelle James (@CreatvEmergence) once wrote about this in the blog article Improv Theatre and Complex Adaptive Systems. (I’m not an expert on improv myself – although I did take part in a rather fun improv exercise at trampoline last Saturday!) Michelle lists a set of seven “rules” of improv, and particularly notes that when the players break these rules, it makes for bad theatre. The emergence is lost:

So, what make it “look hard” when it is not working so well? Simple: any violation of the principles. If one of us tries to orchestrate, or worse impose, our own agenda or plot on the piece. If one of us tries to be the “star” and take too much focus. If even one of us is not present to what is unfolding, moment-by-moment. If one of us worries about the plot, and starts to figure out how to “save” it. If we expect that someone should respond in a certain way. In short, anything that gets us out of the moment and what is emerging – and into our controlling heads.

So I see this as support for Johnnie’s “notice more, do less” facilitation approach. You need the groundwork there first – you need to have an understanding of the group of people involved, and some sort of plan or general direction. You need to do the “Hosting”. But the rest is up to the people themselves.

Let the results emerge.

photo: thesquigglyline

This morning, I presented on the same topic as my last KMLF presentation – see this post for the details.  This time, I have tweaked the presentation a little, and had the luxury of enough time to get the audience engaged in the conversation. Since the KMLF presentation, I have also  written an article on this topic for Online Currents, which is being published this month. A copy of the article will be posted here a little while after the magazine is out.

The new slide pack is now up on SlideShare.  One thing that has emerged from this work that is added to this version of the presentation is my proposed Innovative Meeting Test:

• Have we all been introduced?
• Is everyone open and willing to change?
• Are we all taking equal turns?
• Is the talk friendly and constructive?
• Do we have sufficiently diverse viewpoints?

These events will be taking place at the Abbotsford Convent. Information Governance will run from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon; Followership from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm. Booking is required for these sessions – entry is only $20 for each.

Information Governance: How do we manage this flood of “stuff” that we have created as individuals and organisations? More information here; Book now.

Followership: We hear a lot about leaders, but what about followers? Some more background at the Followership Centre; Book now.

Matt Moore is Director of Innotecture. He has over a decade’s worth of experience working in knowledge management, learning and development, internal communications and community development with PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, Oracle and the Australian government. See more info at http://innotecture.co….

Please feel free to pass this on to anyone else that may be interested in attending.

This will be similar to earlier versions of this presentation, but will have a little more stress on the use of Social Media principles in this work.  The outline is as follows:

How do you encourage technical experts to share their knowledge with others in the organisation that need it to do their jobs? How do you maintain currency and accuracy? This case study presentation will explain how to build a successful knowledge transfer toolkit, covering aspects such as:

• Encouraging knowledge-sharing behaviours
• Building a program-managed multimedia toolkit, comprising content, communication, learning and social media
• Governance – keeping content up to date
• Engaging the target audience in improving content
• Using social media principles to build trust and engagement

See you there?

The slide pack, including speaker notes, is available at SlideShare. A list of references is also included on the Notes page of the last slide.

The main ideas drawn on for this presentation are as follows:

• Some thoughts from Theodore Zeldin on “conversation and minds”, from  David Gurteen’s site.
• Research by Anita Williams Woolley, et al, who found that “small groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks”.
• My previous post  on The Idea Monopoly?.
• An article about Steven Johnson’s ideas on cultural progress, discussing his book Where Good Ideas Come From.
• Research by Oscar Ybarra, et al, showing that even brief, friendly conversations can improve individual mental function.

We also discussed the pros and cons of the format, with mixed results. I think that it is a great format, provided that it can lead into further discussion as required. We have just started using MeetUp for managing Melbourne KMLF events, so expect further discussion on the MeetUp post.

In conjunction with this event, we are running an Enterprise Content Management maturity assessment survey based on the open source ECM3 methodology. It should take you 10 minutes and you will be in the running for some nifty Apple technology. Summarised results will be available under a Creative Commons license. So please take the survey and let us know what’s going on!

More information on the clinic will be posted here and on the Innotecture site as it is developed.

The first part  addressed the dynamics of collaboration and CoPs – a discussion about community.  This is built on articles I have written previously, one of which is discussed on this site.  This also refers to Stan Garfield’s Communities Manifesto.

The second part provided some of the outcomes of the work Matt Moore and I did in our survey and report OzCollab – Collaboration Software in Australia. We then broke into a collaborative exercise, using another card game involving Patrick Lambe’s KM Method Cards.

The final part of the session then addressed the approach to participative change that has also been discussed here before – The Idea Monopoly.  This highlights the need for creativity, trust and openness in today’s complex organisations, and draws on the Cynefin model and other recent research.

The Slide Packs are now available on SlideShare – they are:

Knowledge Transfer Toolkit Program

This case study outlines how to capture knowledge from a team of experts and make it available to a non-expert target audience.

A managed program approach is used to bring together all of the (traditionally separate) threads of content management, communications and learning to form a coherent, flexible knowledge transfer toolkit. A key element in putting this program into place is to encourage the required behaviours of all participants, including promoting knowledge sharing.

Using social media as a business tool

Topics covered are:

• Trust and openness –the new paradigm for engagement
• The importance of people and personality
• Evaluating the benefits, risks and challenges
• Existing channels and new strategies
• Practical examples of social media

“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:

• See the Wikipedia entry for Cynefin.
• Read more about Teresa Amabile’s work in an earlier post here – or see the original Harvard Business School article.
• See the RSA Animate overview of Dan Pink’s Drive on YouTube – The surprising truth about what motivates us.
• Read Greg Lloyd’s blog post about Drucker – Enterprise 2.0 Schism.
• See John Smythe’s Engage for Change site.
• See the Wikipedia entry for The Wisdom of Crowds.

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.