My apologies for the mixed metaphor in the title, but I’m pressed for time these days.  I certainly need to improve my blogging frequency, monthly just does not cut it with me.

My 'Other' Memory Palace

We recently began to settle on a strategy story line at our little shop, to capture our approach to improving life options for children of color and poverty through education transformation.  Even that is a mouthful, but it gets harder.  Ready?  We aim to:

Accelerate achievement for these children through system redesign in order to realize a personalized learning experience for each child.  We will pursue this by working in a network of selected districts established under umbrella ‘innovation zones,’ connected by a common information services platform.  We will deliver frameworks for innovation in education and specific tools that have proven effective – recognizing a spirit of both experimentation and measurement.  We will work to establish lasting networks for sustained innovation across the educational system, improving the probabilities that innovation will lead to systemic transformation.  We don’t want to lock in our 21st century understanding of learning – we are currently locked into a 19th century approach and have learned the hard lesson of stagnant markets for education.

Whatever you think of the paragraph above (and how many floors would that elevator ride take to explain?), I am able to recite it at will because the pieces live in my childhood home on Long Island.

Allow me to elucidate.

Borrowing from Matteo Ricci and reaching back to 1596, I first rely on the accidental blueprint in my head regarding the home in which I spent my first 16 years (and then a few additional years, but that is a story for a different blog).  As I first heard and talked through our strategy, I walked through my home and placed artifacts or built structures to remind me of the elements.

Walking in my front door, I head first upstairs – in the bathroom I have placed a speedometer to reflect Acceleration.  We were a family of six, with one and one-half baths.  Acceleration was something often requested of the inhabitant.  Walking to the back bedroom, I find Personalization because my sister once painted the walls a hideous blue that refuses to leave my memory.  Walking back up the hall, I stop at the bedroom I used as a teenager.  Here is where I used to exit the home using the window, sliding down the garage roof for post-curfew appointments.  Of course, this reflects System Redesign.  In the smaller front bedroom, I placed imaginary scaffolding to reflect how much I wanted to rebuild the room when sleeping there as a small child.  Hence, Frameworks.  In the fourth bedroom are many boxes containing – the Tools.  The man of the house had been packed up and moved out when I was 11 years old, hence the packing crates with tools.

Walking downstairs, I sidle past the System Architects sitting on my couch – my sisters’ boyfriends who curried favor by fixing things around the house – to the dining room which long featured a “swamp cooler” for “air conditioning.”  Here I imagine the humidity and flora, including the Cocoon (innovation zone).  In the kitchen, where my mother spent weekends perfecting her sauce in a large kettle (every home on Long Island understands the Italian sauce that lasted all week), I find the Information Services Platform.  Here I pause for a bite of most excellent sausage (Laws), as most of my conversations begin with the new role of the Federal government in education and the opportunities this provides for our endeavors.

So there is my Memory Palace.  Hardly a palace to my recollection, but it’s an internalized physical space through which I can wander and survey the elements of our strategy. My childhood home is filled currently with the elements for education system transformation.

Where is your Memory Palace, and what do you keep there?

I first heard the reference, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” from a colleague at RAND, (one of the three “Daves” who taught me so much), whose gentle humility and formidable intellect led me to believe he had created the phrase. Later, I came to realize this is a common phrase used to describe the core business model for academe and science – we learn from the inquiry that went before us in order to reach higher. I ruin the phrase here with some trepidation. However, it communicates well my personal angst as I observe thought experiments which appear to lack an awareness of the science that has gone before.

First though, a story.

A former colleague and friend, (not a Dave) whose company I miss greatly, was saved from certain death by the recognition-primed decision ability of his emergency room physician. Stranded for three days on a mountainside following a blizzard, my friend had severe frostbite affecting his hands, feet and face. The physician, before any other decision, immediately began treating my friend with antibiotics, even though there were no overt signs of infection. The good doctor had experience with a fast-moving and deadly opportunistic infection syndrome that targets frostbite victims. Because of the severity of his wounds, my friend was down to hours of life had this infection not been treated.

The physician acted on metaphor, saving a life. My friend lost part of his nose, all his toes, and the sense of touch in several fingers (I hope he forgives the title of this post, and accompanying photo, now that I think of it). He endured nine root canals in one day, and months of rehabilitation. However, he is alive, and gets about without prosthetics, thanks to the physician’s reliance on recognition-primed decision making.

Regarding my reference above,
Gary Klein defines the Recognition-Primed Decision model thus: “[it] fuses two processes: the way decision makers size up the situation to decide which course of action makes sense, and the way they evaluate to evaluation that course of action by imagining it.” (p.24)

Klein, in a his ground-breaking work regarding decision-making, shares the findings from a decade doing field research: decisions are not made according to classic methods of rational choice theory, but closer to Simon’s satisficing model. Rather than using deductive logical thinking, analysis of probabilities, and statistical methods; we actually employ intuition, mental stimulation, metaphor and storytelling.

• Intuition: size up a situation quickly
• Mental stimulation: imagine how a course of action might be carried out
• Metaphor: draw on our experience by suggesting parallels between the current situation and something else we have come across.
• Storytelling: consolidate our experiences to make them available in the future, either to ourselves or to others.

Why is all this relevant to me today?

My recent reference to the death of Knowledge Management (KM) in the Defense Department appears to have sparked some reaction – most of it aimed at this silly pundit who fails to realize either the successful KM at the grassroots level, or the need for consolidation of intent at the highest levels in order to ensure the success of KM throughout the Department.

One interesting email chain consisting of 63+ voices (most of them silent, I’m not that provocative after all) supplies most of my information regarding the negative response. (I have received welcome words of encouragement as well, omitted here for brevity.) For the most part, folks feel I unfairly declared KM dead in a most unhelpful manner and at a most inopportune moment – and am utterly mistaken. The fact that so many professionals are working in the field, trying to advance the principles of KM in the Department, surely proves me wrong. In addition, how can an effort to gain status, standing, and funding for KM efforts at a higher level be attacked as misguided? Should not we applaud such efforts, rather than snipe from the sideline? If I only understood how things work in DoD, I would realize that without some visibility and senior leader buy-in for KM programs, the whole exercise would never gain traction in an enduring fashion.

Given a precept for KM, i.e., the overall value is to enable better decision-making and actions, I submit we should gauge the likely relevance and utility of KM efforts against the ability to effect better decisions – in the context of what we know from research into naturalistic decision-making inquiry.

Some excellent points are made by Bill Kaplan in comments to my original post, and by some justifiably emotional voices on the email chain I referenced earlier: Grassroots efforts do exist and thrive, but they have failed to scale across the Department or to effect the lasting change for which we all hope. Intellipedia has the promise to transform our notion regarding finished intelligence – but a thoughtful professional in the IC went out of her way to inform me that even this effort still faces effective organizational antibodies.

(As an aside, this conversation with the IC professional occurred in an atmosphere of deeply shared context and using a high degree of trust built over past conversations – with a woman I have never met or spoken with outside the Twitter communications “channel.” Perhaps one idea for DoD KM lies in advising Information Security professionals to open up closed social media channels?)

My other examples (AFKN, etc.) likewise have not transformed the Department, but have enjoyed limited diffusion, failing to achieve the elusive “network effect” that might lead to transformation.

Without some high air cover, even Intellipedia, this jewel of federal social media and distributed cognition, could face marginalization or cancellation. Were it not for some managers who “get it,” grassroots efforts appear doomed to provide lasting success. How could I argue against the very efforts that are trying to scale and sustain the grassroots? My quick answer: because they will fail, for lack of learning from what works. Bill Kaplan, again, provides context from a practitioner view – read his comment to learn more. In addition to this practitioner view, the science (Klein, others) is clear regarding the naturalistic decision making processes that should be targeted if we are to improve decisions.

Therefore: what KM methods best prepare us for better decisions? What is the role of portals and repositories if we rely on the experiential knowledge that fuels intuition? Of what use is a workforce “trained” in KM if we learn by experience and through the collection of fragmented narrative? What on Earth do “common KM metrics” mean to situational context that is extremely local?

The central question, perhaps, is one of innovation. KM professionals have grasped a view of methods and principles that must fuel innovation in the ways we decide, act, and operate. The trick now is to scale iterative innovation (grassroots initiatives) and enable disruptive innovation (changes to business models resulting from these grassroot “beautiful exceptions”). (Apologies to my new colleagues, who taught me this excellent phrase in the context of educational innovation.)

KM may be dead, or not, in DoD, but debating that is not all that useful. Instead, why not consider how to scale successes and transform operations; based on what the very much alive KM professionals have accomplished so far in DoD and across the federal and private sectors. And in doing so, why not learn from examples where innovative ideas and methods have transformed industries and social endeavors? Two examples of private sector innovation include:

1. Lockheed Martin’s “skunkworks,” a division that operated free of any corporate process or overhead in order to incubate a radically new business model.
2. Charles Schwab’s embrace of online trading within a subsidiary that featured an entirely new sales staff with different compensation schedules – again to incubate a new business model. Clayton Christensen favorably compares this to Merrill Lynch (remember them?), who tried to incorporate, in a literal use of that term, online trading into their existing business model – to mixed results.

Where has innovation ever been realized through centralized training programs, common metrics and standards, or a maturity model? Let’s return to first principles – consider the inquiry that has gone before, and consider also the knowledge needs of that young person on that mountain far away. Disclaimer: As with so many of you, and likely of those among the 63+, one of those young people is family to me. I dearly wish to see him succeed – and to embrace him again someday.

Yesterday, I was most privileged to sit in on a session with some of the senior folk in DoD Knowledge Management (KM). The setup encouraged an intimate conversation among these government leaders, with twice more their number sitting and observing (a well-placed gag rule limited conversation to the table people only). Each Service was represented, as well as select Commands and activities. Disclaimer 1: While the meeting was invitation only, the findings/preliminary decisions were discussed in open panel sessions later in the day.

It was here I was privileged and sobered to witness the death of Knowledge Management in DoD.

The gathered expressed an interest in coordinating their efforts for greater effect. These are honest, hard working professionals who, unfortunately, ended up embracing approaches and models that have failed repeatedly, and have helped sound the death knell for large-scale KM programs across industry.

In the audience, at least one of us was eager to hear of the most pressing challenges for KM in DoD. I imagined the issues would include improving the work of the warfighter, increasingly faced with knowledge-intensive tasks in rapidly changing environments. Or perhaps they are frustrated by the lack of coordination with security and information officers.

Of course, they are. But addressing these directly would require a more passive role for KM. Perhaps solutions would include quietly raising the information transfer dial tone, to enable the warfighter to discern signals in a noisy environment; applying KM principles to colleagues and workflows within and among HR, IT, strategy, and operations; or embracing social media strategies, pilots, and deployments to enable ambient feedback and unanticipated participation across the DoD workforce, etc.

These notional ideas involve embedding KM ideas into existing organizational frameworks and work lives. None of these would focus first on the establishment of a central KM function; with standards, vetted processes, certifications, and a KM workforce with specific competencies. Indeed, Stephen Bounds recently crafted a white paper that describes the futility of “un-targeted” KM programs in reducing knowledge failures. More troubling, these programs fail to identify the knowledge failures that carry the largest risk.

After all, KM successes are targeted initiatives: such as Air Force Knowledge Now, where 15,000 communities of practice self-organize across the USAF, providing the ability to discover expertise in the field or even revolutionize approaches to work among teams such as the ones currently training the Iraqi Air Force. Or like CompanyCommand, where army platoon leaders self-organized so they could share online issues of immediate interest in the war zone. Or like the adaptive processes that are currently being worked in Afghanistan. Or Intellipedia, initially a guerrilla deployment of a collaborative authoring capability that is questioning, and may one day transform, the notion of “finished intelligence” for the U.S. Intelligence Community.

What do these successes have in common? They were grassroots efforts, emerging from the workforce. Each came under fierce attack from the established information and knowledge leaders. Perhaps these KM leaders would find new and imaginative ways to get out of the way of the noble warfighters, to allow for more frequent successes, and clear the path for more of these targeted successes.

Instead, the gentlemen in this room converged on the need to convene as an enduring working group, with an initial agenda as follows:

- Establish a higher reporting relationship for Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO). The fear is that unless the CKO is located high enough in the food chain, KM programs will not receive funding. There was also some discussion about peer interactions among the leadership – sadly, the focus was on organizational charts and reporting chains of command, rather than process or methods of value exchange among CIO, CKO, Personnel, Training, Operations, etc.

- Establish a certificate program for KM at an accredited school affiliated with DoD. Participants were careful not to cast this as a certification program, which would imply a certifying body and other rigor – a fool’s errand in KM. Rather, this is envisioned as a graduate-level certificate for KM in the DoD. Where I would hope to see the teaching and mentoring of KM “competencies,” however defined, across all of DoD; these gentlemen instead focused on developing a KM workforce unto itself.

- Develop common KM metrics across programs. There is some frustration with answering the “value question,” and agreement on the need for predictive and quantitative metrics that will finally justify and codify the work of KM. They agree on the notional value of narrative, but there was precious little discussion regarding the assessment of individual narratives against KM value proposition – what makes a “good” story?

- Embrace a KM organizational maturity model. The analog discussed was the CMM program for software development (reference: Software Engineering Institute). Pursuing this analogy, I was struck by the fact that the most promising software methods of the day (XP/Agile, etc.) emerged not from any SEI effort, but rather outside the hallowed halls of CMM-certified organizations. This is natural: maturity models are not designed to foster innovation or creativity – relatively messy endeavors when one is seeking standards and efficiency. Instead, these maturity models presume stages, indicators, and a relatively static representation of what an “mature” organization looks like in terms of software development, project management, and perhaps soon for DoD: Knowledge Management.

Thanks to this central focus on an “un-targeted program,” DoD KM is dead. And federal KM, coalition KM, indeed whole-of-government coordination is today much harder. Or at least it was not made any easier following these deliberations.

The first and last conversation involved a plea to define knowlege management. As Confucius taught; “first, define your terms.” The fundamental first step for any discipline or even conversation might involve a clear agreement to terms, and this, apparently, has yet to occur within DoD KM. Disclaimer 2: One participant referred to the 31-page section on KM in the recently released (full) report from the Project on National Security Reform as a reasonable starting point to get them past the question of KM definitions. On behalf of my hard-working team from the PNSR KM Working Group, I am delighted our work is proving useful to the field.

With a focus on KM structures that will fall eventually of their own weight, the grassroots are left to their own devices, as they have been all along. KM is not the job of these gentlemen. It is incumbent upon all of DoD to find ways to solve their problems locally, as they always have been, with a leadership across IM/IT whose job is to balance the security of the information space with the need to get out of the warfighter’s way. It is everyone’s responsibility to share information, to grow their combined knowledge and competence, and to help the Department advance, thrive and prevail.

The focus should not be on the KM troops or the CKO. DoD has arrived at the notion that KM is essential, and has moved therefore to secure the position of KM across the Department. This, sadly, removes the focus from what works, and from the warfighter. A focus on a large KM program, careers, etc, is to focus on a structural fix to a behavioral and technology problem. Worse than not fixing it, these structures work against the very types of initiatives that succeed on the ground.

There are others working quietly to raise the dial tone, others working outside this room. There will always be “heroes of the revolution” who will seed social media and open up access to knowledge despite the barriers. There remain ways to get around rigid processes that do not add value to the mission. And, while not betraying confidences, not everyone at this table agreed to the monolithic approach for KM. So there may be hope yet.

One final thought. Every single person given a voice, and a seat at this august table, was a middle-aged or older, white, man. [Update, I am not trying to imply that race matters in this conversation, I'm trying to focus on the need for diverse voices in a field that relies so heavily on behaviors and persuasion.  Apologies for any who were distracted.]

This matters.

In theory, diverse voices help sustain the health of a complex organizational system. In practice, it was jarring to hear not a single young voice from the Generation these men are trying to assist. I couldn’t help but wonder how these deliberations would have sounded on the ear of someone serving today in a Joint Operations Cell, or on a high mountain somewhere far from Washington, DC.

The following is a “revised and extended” version of my remarks at the PNSR Futures Conference this week in Washington D.C. (PNSR = Project on National Security Reform.)

FINDING: The national security system is not organization, nor even a system of shared purpose.  My observations lead me to believe it is better described as an ad hoc consortia of competing interests. 

Assessing knowledge flow across this “system,” therefore, is akin to understanding the flow of capital across and within financial markets. Yes, I am jumping on the coattails of current headlines.  Suddenly, people who never considered derivatives trading are telling each other “credit is frozen,” and “the markets lack trust.”  Suddenly, it’s a bit easier to discuss knowledge management via analog to financial markets and capital flow.

Common between these two worlds:

• issues of trust, 
• expectations of reciprocity, 
• primacy of individual cultures, 
• expected rewards, 
• hidden agendas, 
• local authorities preferred when confronted with cross-organizational mission, 
• etc.

For the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) we used systems analysis – with an emphasis on complex systems – to understand the challenges and ideas for reform.   This an augmentation to the study’s original reliance on organizational analysis, which can be normative regarding expected roles and functions.  If you approach a non-organization using an organizational lens, you will likely end at recommendations that speak of “headquarters staff size” or “unity of purpose.”  

Some of these organizational observations will be useful – the human capital team’s recommendation of a common approach to the national security workforce comes to mind.  But the use of an organizational lens alone will fall short of understanding how to employ leadership and management techniques best suited to a complex adaptive system of functionally-oriented public agencies.

Therefore, while we present KM problems and recommendations in the PNSR report, it is essential to understand that – because of the market, or systems nature of the problem – fixing the KM problems requires a concomitant focus on human capital, process, development of a grand strategy, placing mission instead of functional resourcing, etc.  

(I’ve written of the problems and recommendations before, but wanted to place them in context one last time before moving on with my life.)

Without a systemic approach to reform, these KM recommendations alone will not solve the basic problem of helping the national security system know what it knows.

Knowledge management problems

• Sharing knowledge across organizational boundaries remains difficult.  Agency cultures still discourage information sharing, although this is changing at the “point of the spear.”  Interoperability across classified networks is difficult, to say the least.  Even when we can communicate, we lack a shared lexicon across national security interests – try having a conversation with someone who has spent at least 3 years working at DoD or State.  (Or Morgan Stanley.)
• Organizational learning is thwarted.  Not only does the new team find empty safes when they arrive, but there is a tendency (this last transition being an exception) among many new incoming national security teams to believe: “If these guys knew what they were doing, we wouldn’t be here.  What could we possibly learn from them?”
• The national security system lacks true global situation awareness.  A few cognitive truths here:  We don’t know our own biases.  We don’t fully understand how we make decisions.  Add to this the orientation of the functional organization, each interpreting new information within a group filter.  Now add stress, uncertainty, and you have a system where the only time a “common operating picture” is available is in the White House (or on Capitol Hill).  Lower in the ranks, it is extremely difficult to comprehend the global situation as it is unfolding.
• Current data systems do not provide or are not employed in a manner that promotes optimal knowledge sharing.  The state of public sector computing, while improving in some ways, remains abysmal.  Program funding solidifies the primacy of functional coherence over whole-of-government understanding.  Information systems still lack common data abstraction, business logic, and protocols.  And, thanks to our friends the technology vendors, government clients come to believe that buying “a portal” or “collaboration technology” solves this problem.  “We have collaboration – other agencies can come share their information on our portal!” “My agency has an enterprise license for Search.  Now everyone can find the information they need!”

Recommendations

• Provide Institutional  Memory Through NSC Librarian /Historian.  The National Security Council needs a library function to help it understand decisions across Administrations.  The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff has an appointed term that crosses Administrations to provide continuity, let’s learn from this example.
• Establish Office of Decision Support on National Security Council.  Charter for this office is open to discussion, let them first tackle common security clearances – as the current efforts here lack inter-Agency authorities.  (Waivers are taking all the teeth – or at least the incisors – out of these efforts.)
• Establish Agency Chief Knowledge Officers and associated Council. The cadre of Federal CIOs are incentivized to provide secure, reliable, performing systems.  In other words, CIOs would maximize their bonus if all their ‘users’ died or otherwise stopped trying to use the systems.  Perhaps it is time to focus on the knowledge their users need to do their job.
• Establish a ‘Federal Information Services Agency.’ Stop talking and move to the cloud.  Get commodity IT services coordinated, get data servers out of downtown Washington, establish compatible GALs, stand up FISA to own the janitor and plumber functions of IT.  
• Subordinate Information Security Functions to Operations.  If you have had the delightful experience of deploying systems on a protected network, doubtless you have had to pass (multiple) security audits.  Have you ever heard of a security person filing an “operational impact statement” before locking down a firewall rule, closing off access to YouTube, or taking away flash drives?  It’s time the security professionals worked for someone – the current system places them in charge, and their decisions are unreviewable by the workforce.  We need to manage, not mindlessly work to reduce, risk.

And finally, in his Senate testimony (response to Q&A), ADM Blair – who was confirmed this week as the new Director for National Intelligence, pointed to these last two as essential reforms he plans to tackle immediately.  While efforts are underway, our recommendations involve removing the waivers inherent in the current executive orders and authorizing legislation.

• Establish Unified Security Classification Regime
• Establish Unified National Security Clearances

How will he learn what Papa knows?

The title for this post is taken from a 1993 RAND report written by two friends and former colleagues.  It is occasionally useful to revisit the first principles when discussing weighty matters such as KM.  Or, as was the case for my friends, U.S. Strategic Forces.

A recent conversation on Twitter involved a fairly innocuous blog posting that discussed briefly the notion of tacit and explicit knowledge.  The problem, for me, is the definition for tacit knowledge in this blog was “that which has not been recorded, written, printed, or otherwise captured in some medium.”  Explicit knowledge, by contrast, has been.  Therefore, the challenge is to make tacit knowledge explicit – because knowledge is only transferred through explicit mediums.  To quote:

Unless converted into explicit knowledge, it cannot be shared because it is ‘trapped’ in one’s mind.

The post also referenced a second gentleman, who posed an even more pithy and awful definitional distinction:

He says that the tacit-explicit distinction is abstract and, in reality, knowledge is ‘either findable by your computer or it is not findable by your computer.’ 

Rather than just letting it go as the Bride often advises, I sent a brief message to the first gentleman, expressing my nonconcurrence with his definitions.  Through the magic of Twitter, this became a conversation enjoined by several souls, and I was finally challenged to provide some primary sources that inform my apparent heartburn.  

In all honesty, while the ensuing discussion may appear “abstract” to some, the nature of knowlege should be at least partially understood if one is to consider themselves a practitioner of knowledge management.  Else, content yourself to the vital and growing field of information management – there is no shame in this whatsoever.

It is important here to note that the original post was intended to briefly acknowledge the academic distinctions, but more to exhort people to share the knowledge trapped in their heads.  I agree with this noble intent, but fear the post does violence to related theory.  Believing that knowledge is only transferred once it has been made explicit leads to mechanistic, engineering approaches to knowledge management that have not proven their worth.  Crank it out of people’s heads, churn it into a shared taxonomy or tag it somehow, and then – and only then – is it useful to others.  I would like to know the exact date that the apprentice learning model was made obsolete by advanced information technology.

While a tidy approach to KM (actually more an approach to information management), the call to “make tacit knowledge explicit” ignores much of what we know about how the world actually works.  To be more precise, we are learning the limitations of what we can know as a result of research across the disciplines of sociology, neuroscience, anthropology, and others.  

Last caveat, I do not have much argument with the practitioners who offered via Twitter that tacit knowledge can be made “partially explicit,” or with the gentleman who offered that the fragmented chatter on Twitter was actually an idea way to begin sharing tacit knowledge.  The promise of social media indeed is that serendipitous connections of people, linked via fragmented information, is a step towards knowledge management that recognizes the fruitlessness of other approaches – including ones that seek to harvest tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge bins.  

Here then, my brief list of “first principles” to understand before drawing conclusions regarding the “implementation” of KM.  If these are true, they should change your view on “making tacit knowledge explicit.”

0. Principle zero: define the terms.  Where did we get this term “tacit knowledge?”  Michael Polanyi described it this way:

Thus to speak a language is to commit ourselves to the double indeterminancy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our own continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on our experience.  For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also, in the view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.

While technically true that “not findable on your computer” agrees with this paragraph, I find that characterization falls short of Polanyi’s meaning.

1. We don’t know how we know what we know, or make decisions; and therefore unwittingly misrepresent what we know when asked to describe the process.  Lakoff claims that understanding “takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts.”  He shows how these experiences are a product of:

• Our bodies (perceptual and motor apparatus, mental capacities, emotional makeup, etc.)
• Our interactions with our physical environment (moving, manipulating objects, eating, etc.)
• Our interactions with other people within our culture (in terms of social, political, economic, and religious institutions) p.117

Gompert, et al., examined the dual roles of information and intuition in decision-making in their investigation into how to increase “battle wisdom” for U.S. forces.  Asking General Patton how he made the decisions he did will not prepare you to respond similiarly in like circumstances.

Snowden puts it this way:

There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality.

Medina agrees:

The brain constantly receives new inputs and needs to store some of them in the same head already occupied by previous experiences.  It makes sense of its world by trying to connect new information to previously encountered information, which means that new information routinely resculpts previously existing representations and sends the re-created whole back for new storage.  What does this mean?  Merely that present knowledge can bleed into past memories and become intertwined with them as if they were encountered together. Does that give you only an approximate view of reality? You bet it does. p.130

2. We learn through fragmented input and internal cognitive patterns, embedding extensive context from our environment at the time of learning.  Medina, discussing the work of Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel (2000), relates how the brain rewires itself.

Kandel showed that when people learn something, the wiring in their brain changes.  He demonstrated that acquiring even simple pieces of information involves the physical alteration of the structure of the neurons participating in the process. p.57

Fauconnier and Turner discuss cognition – in part –  in terms of guiding principle for completing patterns, as humans seek to blend new concepts onto what they already know.

Pattern Completion Principle: Other things being equal, complete elements in the blend by using existing integrated patterns as additional inputs.  Other things being equal, use a completing frame that has relations that can be the compressed versions of the important outer-space vital relations between the inputs. p.328

Brown, et al, take on traditional teaching methods in their work showing that “knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used.”

The activity in which knowledge is developed and deployed, it is now argued, is not separable from or ancillary to learning and cognition. Nor is it neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of what is learned. Situations might be said to co-produce knowledge through activity. Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue, are fundamentally situated.

The context within which something is learned cannot be reduced to information metadata – it is an integral part of what is learned.

3. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. For my third principle, I am borrowing directly from Dave Snowden’s extension of Polanyi.  (Snowden’s blog should be at the top of your KM reading list):

 The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

Having read through the first two principles, it should now be evident that relating what we know via conversation or writing or other means of “making explicit” removes integral context, and therefore content.  Explicit knowledge is simply information – lacking the human context necessary to qualify it as knowledge.  Sharing human knowledge is a misnomer, the most we can do is help others embed inputs as we have done so that they may approach the world as we do based on our experience.  This sharing is done on many levels, in many media, and in contexts as close to the original ones so that the experience can approximate the original.  

The grandfather above will not conduct after-action reviews regarding his fishing experiences, write a pamphlet about fishing, and upload it to the family intranet.  Rather, he will take the boy fishing – where he will show him to tie lures, cast effectively, breathe in the experience, and hopefully learn to love what he loves.   

References:

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, January-February, 32-42.

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.

Gompert, D. C., Lachow, I., & Perkins, J. (2006). Battle-Wise: Seeking Time-Information Superiority in Networked Warfare. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press.

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Chain of events: Acquaintance writes email, referencing this blog from APQC.  I respond with a rant, augmented by a couple of acidic twitter messages to release steam.  These rants are posted to my Facebook status line, and results in a brief conversation there with a FB friend – who initially believes I’ve lost my mind.

And now here.  Why here?  I’ve already responded to the acquaintence, and interacted with the FB friend, and overall made my point.  Well, I’m blogging now to establish some measure of permanence to my thoughts.  My apologies then to those two individuals who have already been subjected to my rant.

The APQC blog asked a very reasonable question:  ”What’s the Deal with Lessons Learned?”  The author then posits several reasons:

“What is it about capturing and applying lessons learned that so often trips us up and causes us to never get past the “capture” step of the process? Is it that the mistake or error that prompts the lesson is so context-dependent that we think others couldn’t benefit from it and therefore we don’t capture it at all? Or could it be that whatever repository these lessons disappear into is so unorganized that retrieving them in order to apply them is a huge undertaking? Or is it simple communication–in other words, we simply don’t share our lessons learned proactively with those who might benefit from them? Or some combination of the above?”

My answer: E!  None of the above.

My acquaintance works in the Pentagon alongside his command’s “lessons learned” people, and shared that they go in the field, watch exercises, and then let people know where they made they repeated mistakes.  He was asking the same question:  why don’t these programs work as intended?

In organizations where the machinery is larger than the man, where we serve and tend to the machines, where human behavior and decisions are minor aspects of the overall production line – then things like “lessons learned” along with six sigma, Lean, etc., make some sense and have proven results.  The trouble comes when we apply these mechanisms in organizations where the human predominates.

My response is below, slightly edited, but retaining all the snarkiness.  I should add that I was responding in the context of military training and operations.  In most organizations, my opinion is strongly against “lessons learned” programs.  

Regarding lessons learned…  Let’s think about this for a moment.  The underlying presumption regarding “lessons learned” is that what worked before, will work again – and the context around the new situation will not differ enough to make the “lesson” insufficient to the new challenge.  This is arrogant, demonstrably false and dangerous.