(My title comes from a former colleague who buried this bon mot in a client deliverable – if she wishes me to name her, I shall. Else, know this headline gem is just something I wish I’d written.)

I interjected myself into a listserv conversation last week, stating “documents present a barrier to knowledge – We need to move beyond the document metaphor if we’re trying to cultivate knowledge.”

I was asked to explain myself, as this is considered by some a contrarian view. I first waited a few days while those more eloquent took up the cause – but here is what I responded this morning. I believe a reasonable response is to roll one’s eyes at such talk – I don’t offer a useful alternative to documents (yet), so why attend? Simple: I am trying to shake us free from the belief that improving documents will improve somehow knowledge flows and understanding. If you’ve already begun focusing on enabling conversations rather than uploading more documents to your portal – you have the message.

One friend offered that documents are not barriers but constraints. Here is where I part company: the document may be intended as a constraining frame, but when so much of the ’system’ is omitted, this framing becomes cropping (as in image cropping). Constraint becomes distortion. The brain itself tells us why documents are cropped images of knowledge, not sufficient frames.

The brain knows spatial and temporal patterns, and predicts patterns in its environment. Language shapes expected patterns, and predisposes the brain to predict in certain ways. The marvelous thing here is that our media distinctions such as images, sound, written language, spoken language, emotion, physical response – are blended in memory. In addition: these memories are not stored as blended, but are blended at the point of recall. What is stored are fragments – all knowledge is fragmented until the point of use. An author uses her knowledge to create a document, which – if well crafted and discovered and interpreted well – will form one input for the learner.

For documents from this morning’s email to early religious texts – the context lost between author and reader is significant and meaningful. Even the term ‘context’ seems to me to be a false reference to content metadata. For the brain, context is content. This is why we know more than we can say, and we say more than we can write down. (Polanyi, Snowden.)

{ The photo below is of neolithic ‘art’ from Newgrange in southern Ireland. The meaning for these carvings is utterly absent now, as eons washed away all metadata, culture and context. }

But more than this, our brains make use of our bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand. The Bride and I sat sipping wine on the deck last night, during a difficult conversation. At one point, her reassuring squeeze on my forearm conveyed a silent message that got me thinking about haptic memory, pattern expectations, and the “non-verbal” communication that characterizes some of this transfer. (I compared this favorably to the times she kicks me under a dinner table, the forearm message was much clearer – or perhaps I was “listening” this time.)

Research into everything from micro-expressions to mirror neurons shows us that face-to-face conversation is the richest knowledge transfer experience. Given the flow of information, both conscious and not, during a conversation – the notion that a document can capture the richness of this flow is laughable. For simple problems, documents can be sufficient: (my most recent data point being the bookcase I successfully assembled from instructions penned in China, all the more remarkable if you know how useless I am at such tasks).

The reason I say documents are a barrier, then, comes from their omission of so much context/content – but also from our mistaken confidence in their ability to transfer knowledge of any depth. So long as we believe improving document structures or access will increase knowledge transfer – we will continue to erect barriers to true knowledge transfer and maintain the high error rate that we all swim through each day.

“Human beings are social animals. We come together two by two in friendships and marriages; we form families and teams and the larger aggregations of practices, communities, societies, and nations. These groups assemble to achieve distinctive aims and to provide the satisfactions of sociability…Management thinkers, influenced by economists, have been slower to see the importance of social groups in organizations. They have looked at official organizational units over less formal structures, or have focused on individual workers rather than the groups they belong to.”1

If you look closely at this quote, you’ll see who is blame for the bulk of the silly in our lives today:  It’s those economists again.  Why do economists always seem to factor in humans as if Taylor’s Scientific Management ruled the Earth?  An esteemed colleague once explained:  “Economists have always had physics envy.  They avoided the social sciences as soft and squishy, preferring the publication possibilities and Nobel prizes in the ‘hard science field.’”  That is, until Behavioral Economics came along and discovered that the social sciences actually may offer valid descriptors of messy, incoherent human behavior.

But I digress.  What we are seeing with Gov 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, social media, etc., is nothing less than a celebration of the social over the machine.  We hold conferences, unconferences, ‘Tweetups’ and meetups – all to stay on top of the latest technology, use cases and examples so we can advance the cause in our agencies and businesses.  We argue for openness and access to one another, as a superior organizing principle when you need to gather messy humans into a clump – certainly preferable to the long-lamented organizational chart. (The asparagus photo reminds me of a certain beach in East Hampton, so named because the socializing aspects lead to clumps of people who stand on the beach, eyeing their next friend – no one reclines and enjoys the day passively.)

The next step?  Understand that not all clumps are alike.  The folks on the beach blanket near you are sharing the same environment this long hot summer, are dressed like you and engaging in similar water-worshipping behavior.  Chances are, however, you only look purposefully clumped, at least from the perspective of the pilot in that passing biplane advertising the nearest happy hour.  You have nothing else in common with these folks, and likely do not engage them in conversation.  You do not share a leader, there was no formal training, and you “gathered” in this group without really thinking about it.  (Let’s be honest, you wish you had more personal space and weren’t so clumped.)

You are a group.

Teams: “[A] small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”2 “The group of members evolves into a team by co-generating a shared framework and processes for their interaction and their work. 3

Let’s say you decide to play beach football.  Ok, that’s ambitious.  Instead, let’s build a sand-castle with these people.  You agree on labor division, you set a site that will survive at least one tide cycle, you enlist the nearest children in the endeavor – since what you are really doing is establishing a stable attractor to keep the little darlings from wandering off.  There are processes for molding, moating, and the fine engineering required for the construction of the cupola and gargoyles. (The castle in the photo belongs to my son-in-law, a self-destroying castle with an internal moat. Genius.)

You are a team.

“Firstly, … people are trained in role, and expectation of role instantiating that role with ritual. Secondly … the crew only exists for a short period of time before it dissolves, and then reassembles with different people occupying the roles but with the same expectations. A crew is clearly a formal community which require investment in training and considerable social reinforcement over time.”4

Nearby, an emergency.  Someone wandered too far from the jetty and is in distress.  The lifeguard alerts the nearby medical services, grabs her life buoy and runs to the victim.  The medical team arrives, sets up a perimeter and prepares for resuscitation if necessary.  Every member of the crew has a role to play, and even if they have never met the lifeguard, the information she will communicate to them will be clear, structured and unfettered by language confusion.

You are witnessing a crew.

You have seen this phenomenon among flight crews, on surgical teams, in the emergency room, and among special forces squads or Marines engaged in hostile action.  People have an identity (door-gunner, anesthesiologist, shortstop, nurse, first officer, etc.), often described as part of their identity.  As with teachers or lawyers, members of crews are in professions, with their affiliations secondary to their identity. In a very real sense, the crew becomes part of each individual’s identity.  This does not occur on the team or group level – people speak of part of a cohesive whole, and reunions among crews years later feature more hugs than those that celebrate teams.

Everyone in the crew understands not only their role, but the jobs and roles around them.  The expected interactions are rehearsed and honed.  While not used in business as often as teams, the concept of crews is an extraordinary study in understanding how to recognize and occasionally formalize roles in a team setting.

As we apply social media, information transparency, technology solutions, and process analysis, etc., we should consider the context.  The information needs and process stability for those we serve will vary greatly depending on whether the work calls for a team or a crew – or even whether a group (community of practice) construct is appropriate for the need.  We should also consider how individuals in a community of practice can clump into teams for short-term needs; or even into crews for specialized tasks.

There is room for increased sophistication in how we think about social media.  Let’s not make the mistake of the economist and neglect what the social sciences have to teach us about clumping in social systems.

1 Cohen, D., & Prusak, L. (2001). In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

2 Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (2006). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

3 Beyerlein, M., & Lin, J. (2010). Participation and Complexity in Collaborative Knowledge Generation: Teams as Socio-Intellectual Environments. In A. Tait & K. A. Richardson (Eds.), Complexity and Knowledge Management: Understanding the Role of Knowledge in the Management of Social Networks. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

4 David Snowden, blogging at www.cognitive-edge.com  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2007/11/are_you_on_the_bully_watch.php

Remember the first time you rode a bike without help?  When the steadying hand came off the seat or your training wheels were unscrewed and set aside for a future toddler?   Remember what you were wearing?  For me, it was a tweed suit, with shorts and a cap.  And the hand coming off the seat belonged to a sibling who eased me down a driveway and into the street unattended.  The bike was a black Schwinn RollFast.

Or so I remember.  The tweed suit memory may originate from a picture from sometime during that period, and “my brother pushed me into traffic” is an oft-told story that garners the desired comic effect.  I know the bike is the right memory, as I have corroborating evidence.  The rest is suspect.

Why?

I’m afraid I just played a dirty trick on you.  If you did call to mind your first bike ride just now, you are now re-creating the memory as you ‘re-store’ it.  Your memories are not movies in a vault that you watch from time to time, while not disturbing the film itself. Instead, you interact with long-term memory, and what is then ‘stored’ is the memory as you recalled it, not necessarily the ‘truth of what happened.’  Error is magnified and becomes embedded.  I may have just mucked with a precious memory of your childhood.  Sorry about that.

Our personal long-term memories are recreated when we recall them, often imperfectly.  This all comes to mind as a friend attends a week-long training course in Six Sigma (don’t get me started), and after I was honored to observe a security training course a few weeks ago.  (It is always an honor to sit among the heroes working in the intelligence or warfighting community – these occasions help me remember why I am obsessed with public sector problems.)

What are the implications for training, then, if long-term memories are subjected to this imperfect storage method – and are often triggered by seemingly unrelated stimuli?  (If I smell clove, I am back at a Thanksgiving table, immersed in those memories.)  How do we truly provide “training” that will be remembered, hopefully with some degree of accuracy, long after the PowerPoint dims?  How do we brief colleagues and supervisors without putting them into a poorly lit coma?

For my part, I use methods informed by people like Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and John Medina.  For the small group who sat through my Ignite DC talk in February, the charming fellow in the picture above makes them think of “high school diploma.”  I used the auto-associative function of the neocortex to embed the notion that what we hand high school graduates is less than attractive as they proceed to tackle college and life.

I could have used a simple PowerPoint slide with terrifying statistics to get the same point across, but it turns out storing an image with a simple accompanying message is a better way to cement the idea. Each of my slides consists of an image with very few words, since forcing someone to read your slide as you talk ensures they absorb little.  Reading the slides to your audience reduces this absorption rate to near zero.

In education, the field of ‘learning sciences’ is tackling (finally) the problem of education/training with an eye to how the brain actually works.  Perhaps it’s time to bring the ‘learning sciences’ to bear for corporate/agency training.  Perhaps your slides need to be crafted recognizing that your audience is not bored by you, but by a delivery method that ensures inattention.

Realizing we don’t have a wetware version of SharePoint in our skulls is the first step towards crafting training, briefings and conversations that will resonate, excite, and cause our colleagues to store the information more completely.  What they do with that information, as they call it to mind over time, is utterly out of your hands.  And theirs.
Duarte, N. (2008). slide:ology – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group.

Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On Intelligence. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

Reynolds, G. (2008). Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery: New Riders Press.