I enjoyed a pleasant email exchange recently with someone who referenced an earlier (infamous?) blog posting regarding what I witnessed as the death of Knowledge Management in the U.S. Department of Defense.  Without rehashing that work, I was interested to see that the post was circulating again. I’m happy to be updated on what I saw in 2009, and welcome any opportunity to update that observation.

Within the email exchange, I was asked a question – what do I see as the difference between Information Management and Knowledge Management?  I thought I would share that answer here, offering it up to the gods of Google, in case I need it again someday.

The difference between IM and KM is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author.  Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description.  Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information.  It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain.  And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing.  Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.

First principles, don’t lose sight of how we process our world.

The difficulty is applying this understanding to organizational knowledge.  Knowledge is only in the brain, but organizations have a shared understanding (referred to as ‘knowledge’) as well – humans gathered in groups fit themselves into artificial decision constructs (“collaboration,” “consensus”) in order to leverage the collective individual knowledge to make decisions for the group.  My approach is to understand cognitive science, organizational theory, and information science to understand ways to improve group behaviors.

More research indicating that our inner capabilities for perception, understanding, and imagination are not three separate activities in our brains – but rather an intertwined set of abilities directed at prediction.  We have an efficiency unmatched by any computer: we notice and process only that information about our world that does not match our predictive assumptions.  If the environment around us is unchanging, we are spared the banal status report.  Compare this to mind-numbing staff meetings, where “we go around the table and update everyone.”

But wait.  While mind-numbing as so many organizational rituals can be, aren’t these status meetings a chance to think?  To question status updates that may contain a hint of shift?  To think is to learn.  To think is to be intentional about questioning our predictions.  If the world around us presents us with unexpected information, it gains our attention.  This is how we are wired, but our attention is generally focused only on this ‘exception handling.’  We have to exert ourselves to devote attention to the status quo, to look for minor signs of shift.  Our brains are fantastic at predicting the effects of our movement through our immediate environment, most likely the purpose for this predictive ability, but are famously also able to trap us in bigotry, mistaken assumptions about abstract concepts such as economics or love, or to help us miss out on opportunities to learn.

The picture here represents one of the great corporate slogans from over 100 years ago: Think.  In all things, focus the mind on questioning its assumptions, its expectations.  Our world is famously unpredictable, thinking moves us from reacting to the potential for proactive change – to a place where we notice the quiet signals in our environment that deserve our attention and imagine change.

Today we honor a man who shared his Dream with humanity.  Who demanded we think about our actions, our assumptions, and to change the nation’s ways towards a moral path.  To dream is to think.  To think is to question.  What do you question today?

I stumbled across an interesting perspective this morning – one that argues perhaps we are “over thinking” the notion of a social enterprise.  “How different I wondered was the social capital I build up when I share a Word problem work-around on the company social network from when I lend my neighbor the proverbial cup of sugar.  In both instances, I’m sharing because it’s the proper social thing to do and because I likely believe the next time, that person might help me when I need it.”

The author goes on to posit that our social capital management is probably the same offline as offline.  All these efforts to identify behaviors and set expectations for enterprise social behavior is misguided, we’re making things too complicated.  Invariably, (although not in the piece I reference here), we come to impugn the motives of those who are “making things complicated.” The author, as I say, does not fire that bullet, but sums up thus: “Maybe we are just doing what we’ve always been taught to do, to share and cooperate with one another.  If we tap into these simple ideas, all enterprise social software is doing is taking advantage of the way most of us were brought up.”

Ahem.  In addition to reflecting almost none of the case studies of enterprise social software, the author of this piece misses two critical points: your workplace is not your neighborhood, and the cup of sugar examples fails because sugar-sharing is a 1:1 endeavor, while the Word problem work-around sharing is 1:n.

Taking the second point first: You are much more likely to share assets, resources, knowledge, etc., when approached and asked within the context of an individual’s need – than you are to “share” with no immediate reciprocity or other statement of value.

In other words: you may give your neighbor a cup of sugar upon request, but I doubt you place cups of sugar outside your door on a regular basis.  Nor would you drive to the mall and leave a cup there.

The mall?  To my first point: Yes, the mall is another created social construct, just like your workplace, that drives certain behavior.  When we place ourselves into purposeful social constructs, such as a mall or a workplace, our identity / role / time management (etc.) all change.  The mall is designed to facilitate retail commerce; dropping bags of sugar hither and yon would, among other things, violate the intention of the sugar merchant therein.  Similarly, in your workplace, you are motivated by what is measured and valued. For many reasons, there is a gap between the rate and quality of what is should be shared for organizational value and what is actually shared.

Understanding the organizational incentives, and the degree to which they force us away from our natural good nature sugar-sharing selves, is critical to solving this gap. Social constructs and contexts matter, and comparisons invariably fall down when they ignore the context.

A few years ago, I answered the phone.  I’ve since learned my lesson and silenced the landline.  When someone leaves a message there now, the tiny blue light flickers forlornly until I log on to the interwebs to listen and laugh at the voice mail.  For those particularly entertaining, I forward to my wife’s email for her bemusement. 

But on this day, I answered the phone.  On the other end I found an individual conducting a survey on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  For reasons I can neither recall nor fathom, I listened and agreed to participate.  Once told of the subject, I told the person that I had no connection or experience with these organizations.  It turned out, that did not matter.  She continued to ask me questions about the firms (whose names she read en toto for each question for the next ten minutes); probing all around my completely vacant perception of them.  I wondered aloud how useful this information was, and briefly considered making up outrages or plaudits just to make her day more interesting.

Today, there are new stories about these firms’ attempts to improve their branding and message.  I suspect my interview was part of that, and no doubt rolled up and considered insight into the public mind.  Some unnamed (and named) consultants made serious coin analyzing these results and suggesting ideas to improve the numbers.

How does my experience resemble political polls, which today make up approximately 67% of all news stories? (Statistics are fun to make up, try it yourself!)  How do people respond to questions about how they will vote in a little less than a year?  How many of them take that call as seriously as I took my Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac survey?  How is it so many people still use landline phones, apparently the only method by which these survey firms reach people?

A student of mine opined recently on the qualitative method by declaring it inferior, only useful for setting up the hypotheses for more grownup quantitative methods.  These quantitative methods feature, often, scientific polls with established margins of error.  Far better to consider the aggregate of poll results, careful diced and analyzed; over the anecdotes and full narrative of experience.  Such is the domain of the soft science.  Where “data” relies on those people who are eager to give honest answers to a stranger interrupting their day with a ten-minute questionnaire.

I don’t mean to impugn completely the survey method.  I just wonder how much of what passes for ‘data’ should be taken with a few grains of your favorite seasoning.  Layering time-honored mathematical models on top of an individual’s representation of their thoughts and intentions may not affect, it turns out, the quality of that information.

(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.