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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Saturday, December 05, 2009
A Rubric for Knowledge Management Self-Assessment
Among the knowledge-sharing tools outlined at the Information and Communications Technology and Knowledge Management (ICT-KM) Program's website (see yesterday's post) is a knowledge managment (KM) self-assessment.
Five levels of organizational performance are defined, using behavioral indicators that are specific to each particular dimension. The five levels are:
The way we work (highest)
Consistently apply
Act
React
Awareness (lowest)
To give you an idea of what the rubric identifies as the highest level of knowledge management performance, here are the Level 5 characteristics for each of the dimensions (somewhat edited):
KM strategy
Clearly identified intellectual assets.
KM strategy is embedded in the business strategy.
Framework and tools enable learning before, during and after.
Leadership behaviors
Leaders recognize the link between KM and performance.
The right attitudes exist to share and use others' know-how.
Leaders reinforce the right behavior and act as role models.
Networking
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
Networks have a clear purpose, some have clear deliverables, others develop capability in the organization.
Networks ensure time is set aside for social interaction.
Learning before, during and after
Prompts for learning are built into business processes.
People routinely find out who is knowledgeable in particular areas and talk with them.
Common language, templates and guidelines lead to effective sharing.
Capturing knowledge
Knowledge is easy to get to, easy to retrieve. Relevant knowledge is pushed to you.
Organizational knowledge is constantly refreshed and distilled.
Examples of the tools for which the wiki currently has templated pages are blogs, intranets, language translation technologies, mobile phones, Skype, social media, tagging and social bookmarking, video, and, of course, wikis.
Examples of methods (processes) covered are after action review, appreciative inquiry, critical moments of reflection, impact pathways, mediation, mentoring, Samoan circle, storytelling, speed geeking, and the World Cafe.
The designers of the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit offer help to users in identifying tools and methods of particular relevance to their needs by making suggestions for a number of contexts (not mutually exclusive) in which knowledge sharing is important:
Improving impact through knowledge sharing in research
The page devoted to each of these contexts lists the sorts of questions that typically arise, and suggests tools, methods, and tags of likely relevance. (Each tool and method can be tagged by users. The list of tags is here.)
As an example, you might look at the page for people undertaking advocacy. You will see these four questions and the associated lists of tools, methods, and tags suggested as likely to lead to good answers:
How do we get input on our issues from key constituents? Tools and Methods: The World Cafe, Listening Tags: relationship, collaboration, alliances
How do we make our issues visible to the people we want to reach? Internally and externally? Tools and Methods: Storytelling, Knowledge Fairs, Intranets, Blogs, Microblogging, Workplace Knowledge Sharing Tips, Rural Radio, Wikis Tags: content, dissemination, information, offline
How do we use the web to inform our key publics on issues? Tools and Methods: Blogs, Microblogging, Frequently Asked Questions, Language Translation Technologies, Ritual Dissent Tags: content, dissemination, information, offline
How do we make it easy to get people to act on issues and spread the word themselves? Tools and Methods: Blogs, Microblogging, Mobile Phones, Online Surveys, Rural Radio, Social Media, Social Networking Sites, Yellow Pages, Samoan Circle, Wikis, Peer Coaching, Peer Assists, Graphic Facilitation, Good Practices, Community Interactive Theater, Chat or Talk Shows Tags: relationship, collaboration, online, offline
To polish off the guidance on sources of knowledge about how best to pursue advocacy, the page concludes with a list of additional tags with a decent probability of leading to useful pages in the wiki — namely, advocacy, alliances, collaboration, content, dissemination, information, networks, offline, online, relationship, and stakeholders.
For more of an overview of the thinking behind the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, you can read a June 2008 report written by Gerry Toomey, who has worked as a consultant for CGIAR and the Knowledge Sharing Project.
In a world in which managers are typically flooded with information, it's essential to regularly evaluate what's helpful and what isn't.
The November 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer has a helpful article in which Chris Moore, president of Zeroed-In Technologies, offers a tool for assessing data reports, such as those presenting metrics a company is using to track the results of training.
Moore suggests asking these questions for each report:
What do you do with the report?
What decisions does it help you make?
What is the norm or target for the metrics on the report?
What actions do you take if the report deviates from the norm?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how important is this report to your work success?
How quickly can you refresh the report with current data points?
Is the report too granualar or not granular enough?
Who are the other consumers of the report? What do they do with the information? How would they answer these questions?
The idea is to ensure that metrics managers are (ostensibly) monitoring provide information that can actually guide their decision-making.
As indicated in the graphic below, knowledge capture is the step that gets the knowledge tranfer cycle underway.
This graphic comes from an article in the September 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer. In the article, Marty Rosenheck walks the reader through all the steps in the cycle.
In detailing how to handle knowledge capture, Rosenheck suggests two tools you can use in tandem to elicit the tacit knowledge that experts in your organization bring to bear in their decision-making.
The first of the tools is a card sort:
... a group of experts brainstorm problems, issues and typical situations that they encounter and write them on index cards. They then sort the cards into categories that make sense to them, and then subcategories, creating a tree structure, which reveals the way they organize their knowledge.
... For example, these experts organize problems by how they are solved, using categories such as “communication problems with subcontractors.” The sorting task also enables the construction of a taxonomy of cases, where typical situations are categorized and sequenced from simple to complex to serve as a model for initial learning for novices.
Once you have used a card sort to categorize the various situations your experts handle, you can move on to eliciting details of how exactly they complete tasks and solve problems. For this phase of knowledge capture, Rosenheck suggests drawing up a process table.
As Rosenheck explains, a process table walks your experts through the steps and sub-steps they take in each of the previously categorized scenarios.
For each decision or action, the goal is to elicit the implicit heuristics or guidelines that the expert uses. It begins with first asking, “Why?” Then, after the first answer, which just scratches the surface, keep asking why again ... until you have gotten to the bottom of the decision. Another method is to have the expert compare this decision [for a particular scenario] to decisions in other situations, to get at the distinctions in the expert’s mind.
The remainder of the process table captures the information, resources and tools the expert uses to accomplish that task or make the decision, and how they’re used. Finally, find which other people are involved at each step and what they see as common pitfalls.
Back in December, I wrote a seriesofposts dealing with learning from "positive deviance." Positive deviants are people who manage to do a way-above-average job of solving a particular problem, despite having no more resources than others coping with the same issue.
A topical example of this approach to identifying good solutions to what can seem to be intractable problems is provided by an op-ed column published on August 12 in the New York Times, written by Atul Gawande (Brigham and Women's Hospital), Donald Berwick (Institute for Healthcare Improvement), Elliott Fisher (Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice), and Mark B. McClellan (Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform).
These four healthcare professionals report on a study they conducted in which they set out to find regions of the US that are "positive outliers" in terms of:
per capita Medicare costs
effectiveness, as measured by an array of federal quality metrics
From the 74 regions that fit their criteria, the authors chose ten to come to a meeting in Washington where regional healthcare leaders "could explain how they do what they do." The authors found a variety of successful approaches to controlling costs while maintaining quality:
"Some have followed the Mayo model, with salaried doctors employed by a unified local system focused on quality of care."
Some, with "several medical groups whose physicians are paid on a traditional fee-for-service basis," have been able to find "ways to protect patients against the damaging incentives of a system that encourages fragmentation of care and the pursuit of revenues over patient needs."
"The physicians and hospital leaders from Cedar Rapids told us how they have adopted electronic systems to improve communication among physicians and quality of care."
"The team from Portland told us of a collaboration of doctors, state officials, insurers and community leaders to improve care. For more than four years, physicians have been tracking some 60 measures of quality, like medication error rates for their patients, and meeting voluntary cost-reduction goals."
"Asheville, after gaining state support to avoid antitrust concerns, merged two underutilized hospitals."
"In Sacramento, a decade of fierce competition among four rival health systems brought about elimination of unneeded beds, adoption of new electronic systems for patient data and a race to raise quality."
In sum:
In their own ways, each of these successful communities tells the same simple story: better, safer, lower-cost care is within reach. Many high-cost regions are just a few hours’ drive from a lower-cost, higher-quality region. And in the more efficient areas, neither the physicians nor the citizens reported feeling that care is “rationed.” Indeed, it’s rational.
As the healthcare reform debate continues, I will be interested to see how much weight is given to the experience of the positive outliers whose approaches are outlined in above.
As a follow-on to yesterday's post dealing with DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture), I'd like to call attention to a white paper (pdf) explaining how an organization can adopt DITA incrementally.
The above graphic shows the six levels that Michael Priestley (IBM) and Amber Swope (DITA Strategies), authors of the white paper, define for gradually expanding the scope of an organization's implementation of DITA.
Level 1:Topics — Migrate existing XML content to DITA — using the appropriate topic type for each chunk of information — in order to establish a single source for each topic. "You can easily generate the same information in multiple formats by specifying a different output type when you publish."
Level 2:Scalable reuse — Enable flexible reuse of information by using maps to assemble each deliverable, such as a manual or a Web page. "Because each map is specific to a deliverable, you can optimize the content to include the organization of the content and the links between the topics for each deliverable type."
Level 3:Specialization and customization — Achieve quality and consistency by defining the content types required to meet different author and audience needs and specifying how to meet those needs using structured, typed content. "In addition to creating new structural standards, organizations may choose to customize transforms to provide customized output deliverables, such as training materials or data sheets."
Level 4:Automation and integration — Adopt a full content model by explicitly defining the different types of content required to meet different author and audience needs, and specifying how to meet these needs using structured, typed content. "Organizations need a CMS [content management system] to effectively control and automate the content development life cycle. In addition to storing content and providing versioning control, the CMS provides workflow automation support that assists authors in creating, reusing, and publishing. ... In addition, you need to define a robust metadata model to support the content model and apply it to all topics. Lastly, you must have agreed-upon content development processes in order to automate them with workflow control."
Level 5:Semantics on demand — Achieve dynamic personalization by using DITA as a cross-application, cross-silo tool. "This ... becomes a strategy that covers every source of semantic data or content: DITA becomes the common currency between semantic applications. Data can be exposed as DITA maps; structured or semi-structured content can be exposed as DITA topics at various levels of specialization; and unstructured content such as PDFs, images, or multimedia files can be wrapped using DITA maps to provide a common interface for associating and storing titles, descriptions, and metadata."
Level 6:Universal semantic ecosystem — Achieve universal knowledge management. "DITA becomes the semantic interchange standard for cross-organization, cross-standard, universal content use. ... [O]rganizations that make the move to DITA become part of a semantic ecosystem that enables information sharing and collaboration where and when it’s required, without expensive infrastructure negotiations."
You can read a Q&A with Priestley and Swope, in which they talk about the ABCs of the DITA Maturity Model, here. Note that Priestley and Swope acknowledge that Levels 5 and 6 are pretty much aspirations at the moment. Even Level 4 implementation of DITA is infrequent, so far.
If you are involved in production of documentation that can benefit from chunking and reuse of various modules, you should know about DITA — the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
DITA was initially developed by IBM, which donated the system in 2004 to OASIS — the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. OASIS is now the body that maintains DITA standards.
is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. This architecture consists of a set of design principles for creating "information-typed" modules at a topic level and for using that content in delivery modes such as online help and product support portals on the Web.
Over the years, the variety of materials produced using DITA has expanded beyond technical documentation. Also, aesthetically aware authors have advanced beyond spare, default formatting. You can see a sample of recent DITA Web output that includes video here. This sample is an appealing contrast to more heavily text-based documentation, such as that here.
DITA's core design principles are:
Topic orientation — DITA is used to create discrete units of information, each of which covers a specific subject with a specific intent.
Topic aggregation — Self-contained topics are combined with other topics to produce documents suited for particular purposes and audiences.
Strong typing — Document type defintions (DTDs) and schemas guarantee that DITA topic types follow identical information structures.
Specialization — DITA enables extending basic topic types to new types adapted for a particular use.
Common base class — A top-level topic type provides “fallback” for all specialized types. This ensures that content that contains specialized types is compatible with DITA implementations that do not include these particular types.
Once topics have been created, how some or all of them are used in a particular document is defined by a map. The map organizes the chosen set of topics into a hierarchy (topics and subtopics) and sequence. Use of maps enables a different organization for different deliverables. It also enables reuse of topics.
OASIS's DITA FAQ provides a good complement to the DITA knowledge base you can access here. For a practical guide to using DITA, you can read and work through Louise Kasemeier's 2007 manual and tutorial, DITA for Solo Writers (pdf).
One last point: The reason this architecture is named after Charles Darwin is explained here.
As a follow-on to yesterday's post, I'd like to mention the Miradi software that the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) and Benetech have been jointly developing since 2007. ("Miradi" is a Swahili word that means "project" or "goal.")
Miradi is designed to provide project teams with the essential features that they need to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their conservation projects, in other words, to practice good adaptive management. Currently, most conservation practitioners go through the adaptive management process either using pen and paper, or by cobbling together functions from a wide range of programs including flowcharting, mapping, project planning, spreadsheet, accounting, and other software packages. Miradi takes the right functions from each of these different kinds of programs and bundles them together in one easy-to-use integrated package.
To get a project set up in the software, the user works through a step-by-step process that matches the flow of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation developed by the CMP. Those steps are:
Once the conservation project is set up in Miradi, the project can be managed and tracked using the various data views the software provides.
The Diagram View shows the conceptual model underlying the project:
In a complete conceptual diagram, the overall project scope is linked to specific conservation targets that are each in turn linked to direct threats and the contributing factors that lead to these threats. The diagram also displays the strategies that the project team is taking to counter these threats, showing the key assumptions that the project team is making about how their actions will lead to their desired outcomes. The diagram also allows users to focus on the specific results chain that they predict will happen as a result of their interventions and to determine what indicators they need to measure to test these assumptions over time. [emphasis added]
Other views include the Threat Rating View, Viability Analysis (showing the status of each conservation target, e.g., "coral reefs"), Strategic Planning View, Monitoring View, Work Plan View, and Budget View.
One of the short pieces at the front of the May issue of the Harvard Business Review describes how the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank that undertakes private-sector investment and provides technical assistance in developing countries, is using a knowlege transfer program called "SmartLessons" for internal dissemination of best practices and lessons learned from various IFC projects.
Importantly, the narratives published by the IFC in their SmartLessons write-ups are by no means entirely free-form. Rather, as you can see in examples concerning reform of company inspections in Tajikistan and establishing corporate governance codes in countries of the Middle East and North Africa (pdf), there is a structure to the narratives that makes it easy for the reader to understand project goals, rationales, processes, and responses to challenges. The lessons learned are explained with reference to the specific experiences that suggest that these lessons are indeed principles that can be productively emulated in comparable circumstances in subsequent projects.
For example, Lesson 1 (of six) from the Tajikistan project is "You need strong credibility if you want key players to listen to you." The commentary on this lesson reads as follows:
In Tajikistan, infrastructure or rural development projects often appear far more urgent than advisory projects. It was crucial for IFC to position itself as a credible actor, first through the high quality of the Business Environment survey conducted in 2003, and then through constant responsiveness to government's needs. The Project reacted swiftly to requests, and provided ample review of international practice. Also, it was essential for the Project to combine readiness for confrontation, and for engagement:
Confrontation — No compromise on the message. Survey results were hard on the government; intense "discussion" ensued, but in the end all key players agreed that the results were valid and had to be acted upon.
Engagement — The Project did not just provide advice, but argued for it. It also worked with governmental partners directly on legal drafting, instead of just providing them with reports.
Note that the writing style here is plain English, a key point. I'd also mention that as one reads through the whole set of six lessons learned, they parallel quite closesly the principles for community problem-solving advocated by Xavier de Souza Briggs, as discussed in a previous post.
Strictly speaking, this is a rhetorical query because, at this stage of the game, a wealth of reports has accumulated of companies that have realized valuable results from adding tools like blogs and wikis to their intranets. The real questions Conry-Murray addresses are "Under what circumstances does enterprise social networking pay off?" and "How can you gauge the size of the payoff?"
The whole article, including its sidebars, is worth reading. As an overview, here are the five best practices Conry-Murray recommends for making the most of social networking:
Start with a low-cost pilot to see what tools deliver useful results.
Set modest expectations. "Don't promise executives that enterprise social networking will unleash, ignite, or synergize anything." Instead: "Describe one or two general business improvements you think are achievable. Set reasonable goals for user adoption, and salt your initial deployment with a few teams that are eager for these kinds of tools. And keep an eye out for ways to measure business value. You may not be expected to produce hard numbers from a pilot, but corporate management will want to know the payback down the line."
Let employees use the tools with lightly controlled freedom. If you impose any but the most obvious restrictions (e.g., "No flaming."), you will inhibit participation and constrain dialogue.
Resist exclusivity. When a business unit or team says they want their tools to be accessible only to themselves, press the argument that the full benefit of enterprise social networking comes from openness to broad participation.
Include robust search capabilities. And: "Be sure the search engine allows for user-generated feedback such as tags and content-rating systems, because the point of social networking in business is to let people provide input into the relevancy of content and people."
As a final note, if you find the powers-that-be are leery of the term "social networking," shift to something more business-sounding, like "collaboration tools," until the "social networking" label becomes familiar to the people who have to authorize introduction and roll-out of the tools you believe will contribute to your organization's productivity and growth.
Yesterday's post touted a model for rural economic development that includes peer learning as one of its basic principles.1
A prime example of what this principle looks like in action can be found at the training facility that Practical Action, a non-governmental organization headquartered in the UK, set up in the town of Sicuani in the Peruvian Andes about 90 miles south of Cusco.
A Kamayoq (agricultural extension agent) assisting with guinea pig husbandry (Practical Action)
The basic concept is to train farmers to deliver agricultural extension services to fellow farmers back in their home villages. These peer extension agents are called "Kamayoqs," the Quechua (Incan) name of people in olden times who were skilled in reading the weather and using their forecasting and other agricultural expertise to advise farmers on such things as when to plant their crops.
In line with another of the principles of the "new development paradigm," the interchanges between Kamayoqs and their farming peers are intended to be two-way, i.e., there is a concerted effort to identify best practices in horticulture and animal husbandry, whether from existing standout performers or from experimenting to see what works best. Learning by doing is central to this Kamayoq-facilitated approach to raising poor farmers' standard of living.
The Kamayoqs live in Andean communities above 3500 meters (11,500 feet), communities barely served by the extension staff of Peru's Ministry of Agriculture. The initial Kamayoq training at the Sicuani school occupies one day a week over an eight-month period. The topics covered include irrigation, Andean crops, horticulture, livestock, forestry, and agro-industry and marketing. Continuing education is also provided.
As explained in a 2006 article (pdf) about the Kamayoq program,
Throughout their training, the Kamayoq establish contact with technical experts from the private and public sectors and with other farmers, a useful network which they can tap into when they need information and technical advice once they finish their training. This "social capital" is recognised by many as one of the greatest benefits of the whole course.
The success of the Kamayoq program is seen in the willingness of farmers to pay for the Kamayoqs' services; the addition of marketable crops (e.g., carrots and onions) to traditional subsistence crops (maize, potatoes, and beans); higher farmer income, some of which goes for additional education for children; improved disease prevention and treatment for farm animals; and more sustainable use of natural resources.
An important qualitative impact of the Kamayoq program is increased self-confidence among farmers, an attitude adjustment that motivates innovation. Willingness to innovate is essential for continuing to raise living standards in the face of the changes that are occurring in the farmers' physical and socioeconomic environment.
__________ 1 Practical Action's methodology draws on the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who devoted himself to developing pedagogy for the underclass. You can read more about Freire's work by visiting the website of the Paulo Freire Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tomorrow, I'll describe a particular example of the development model outlined below, but for today I just want to highlight the model's central principles. This improved paradigm for alleviating, even eradicating, rural poverty, is receiving increasing attention among economic development experts because of the good results it is generating when effectively implemented.
The particular version of the model I reference here comes from Pachamama Raymi, a Peruvian non-governmental organization (NGO) whose mission is "to contribute to eradicate rural poverty and reclaim the environment." "Pachamama raymi" means "fiesta of Mother Earth" in Quechua, the language of the Incas.
Pachamama Raymi identify seven shifts in the way development assistance is handled that underlie the methodology — also referred to as "Pachamama Raymi" — that they use:
Old: NGO undertakes project implementation New: NGO provides program assistance
Old: NGO project staff have the leading role New:Community people have the leading role
Old:Top-down approach to deciding on activities New: NGO seeks to stimulate community people’s initiatives
Old: Top-down knowledge transfer New: Peer learning (the focus of tomorrow's example)
Old: An external implementing agent New: Implementing agents who are integrated with and strengthening local governments
Old: Projects invest in hardware New: NGO helps build the capacity of local actors to undertake investment
Old: Amalgamation of fragmented approaches New: Holistic management, involving the three major issues of sustainable development and poverty eradication: health, education, and economic development
In accordance with the set of "New" principles above, the Pachamama Raymi methodology:
identifies the best performing individuals, families and communities, in issues as diverse as natural resources or small business management. [A core element] of Pachamama Raymi is recognizing and giving credit to these outstanding persons and organizations, as well as public recognition of the value and importance of their (ancestral) knowledge and know-how. Another core element is diffusion of this knowledge and know-how among equals through exchange and other elements of Pachamama Raymi. An important tool for motivation is contests between families and between their territorial organizations, with significant prizes. Contests are also a way to identify best practices.
You can read about the history of the Pachamama Raymi methodology here.
You can get a good introduction to the work being done at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) from a short article by Anne Trafton posted at MIT news on January 13.
For CCI's purposes, collective intelligence is defined as "the harnessing of human kinowledge and intelligence that allows groups of people to act together in ways that seem to be intelligent." Computer and Web technology are key enablers.
The basic research question CCI investigates is:
How can people and computers be connected so that — collectively — they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?
I was particularly intrigued by the collaborative deliberation tool CCI has developed as part of its Climate Collaboratorium project. The goal of the project is to address the complex issue of global climate change
through the creation of a new class of web-mediated discussion and decision making forum, called the "Collaboratorium". This system, currently under development, will use an innovative combination of internet-mediated interaction, collectively generated idea repositories, computer simulation, and explicit representation of argumentation to help large, diverse, and geographically-dispersed groups systematically explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concerning systemic challenges.
As Mark Klein, Principal Research Scientist at CCI, notes, "it's essentially impossible for any one person or small group to be cognizant of all of the issues, ideas and tradeoffs" that must be taken into consideration in analyzing a complex problem like climate change.
In the video below, Klein explains the web-based collaborative deliberation tool — dubbed the Deliberatorium — mentioned above.
For a brief tutorial on the deliberation map, which serves as the structural framework of CCI's collaborative deliberation tool, you can watch the 3:10 video below.
You can get a sense of the contrast between the CCI tool and a less effective web-based approach to collecting input from a community of users by reading Mark Klein's critique of the Open for Questions page of the change.gov website (which was created during the Obama-Biden transition and is no longer active).
A more detailed (three-page) explanation of the Climate Collaboratorium project is here (pdf, 2006).
As someone who is watching Microsoft's SharePoint software being customized to meet the needs of a particular business, I can't help wondering whether what I'm seeing represents the most effective approach.
ManageSmarter.com recently published a case study of SharePoint implementation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) which is exemplary in providing quite specific tips not so much for the customization itself, as for designing and developing the accompanying user training, a subject in which I am just as interested.
As Sarah Boehle explains in her brief article, UT-Battelle, the company that manages and operates ORNL, developed its Sharepoint training curriculum "in conjunction with a company-wide initiative to transfer most of the organization's intranet resources to SharePoint servers." The aim of the training "was to teach those new to SharePoint how to use the system, and to show more advanced users how to better capitalize on its many features and functions."1
The tips UT-Battelle offers are:
Begin by analyzing how users really use the system, so you are training on all tasks that are relevant, and only on such tasks.
Use a hands-on format. Admittedly, one would have thought this would go without saying, but UT-Battelle initially used a seminar format, which, not surprisingly, did not meet the training's learning objectives.
Pay attention to the details. I was particularly struck by the decision "to develop a full-color, step-by-step participant manual that details every task in minute detail, complete with illustrating screen shots." The manual guides the users during the training and then serves as a day-to-day reference. For me, the point is that just about every user will regularly consult a well-designed and maintained manual, contrary to the position that some take who argue that manuals sit on the shelf gathering dust.
Keep the training and documentation up-to-date. Among other things, this means keeping tabs on the natural evolution in how users use the software. As Scott Taylor, a UT-Battelle instructional designer explains, "every time I field a new user question, or demo a new feature in class, I always make sure that we add the new task and information to the manual and cover it in the next class."
Once the SharePoint implementation I'm watching is complete, I will use the above tips as a guide for creating accompanying documentation and, as needed, for developing training.
__________ 1 You can get more detail concerning the overhaul of IT at ORNL, which is the larger context in which development of the training described here occurred, from a slide presentation put together last year by Scott Studham, UT-Battelle's CIO.
Positive deviance, discussed in a couple of recentposts, is the brainchild of the husband and wife team, Jerry and Monique Sternin.
In May 2005 Jerry Sternin (who, sadly, passed away on December 11) published an article (pdf) in the Harvard Business Review co-authored with Richard Pascale1 that describes how the principles of positive deviance apply in the business world.
The basic idea is the same as in the context of development economics: When seeking a solution to a problem look for "positive deviants" — people who seem already to have solved the problem despite having access to no more resources than others in the community.
An exhibit in the article summarizes the differences between the traditional approach to change and the positive deviance approach. These differences (here, somewhat edited) are:
Leader as path breaker vs. Leader as facilitator
In the traditional approach, the leader has primary ownership, and the momentum for change comes from above.
In the positive deviance approach, the leader guides the positive deviance process, while the community takes ownership of the quest for change.
Outside in vs. Inside out
In the traditional approach, experts identify and disseminate best practices.
In the positive deviance approach, the community identifies pre-existing solutions and amplifies them.
Deficiency-based vs. Asset-based
In the traditional approach, leaders deconstruct common problems and recommend best practice solutions, with the implicit reproach that the company's or unit's employees aren't as good as their peers.
In the positive deviance approach, the community leverages pre-existing solutions practiced by those who succeed against the odds.
Logic-driven vs. Learning-driven
In the traditional approach, particpants think themselves into a new way of acting.
In the positive deviance approach, participants act themselves into a new way of thinking.
Vulnerable to "transplant rejection" vs. Open to self-replication
In the traditional approach, resistance arises to ideas imported from, or imposed by, outsiders.
In the positive deviance approach, latent wisdom is tapped within the community, which helps forestall rejection. "The trick is to introduce already existing ideas into the mainstream without excessive use of authority."
Moving from problem-solving toward solution identification vs. Moving from solution identification toward problem-solving
In the traditional approach, best practices are applied to problems defined within the bounds of existing parameters.
In the positive deviance approach, the solution space is expanded through the discovery of new parameters.
Focus on the protagonists vs. Focus on enlarging the network
The traditional approach engages stakeholders who would conventionally be associated with the problem.
The positive deviance approach identifies stakeholders beyond those directly involved with the problem.
As a final note, I'd mention the emphasis the positive deviance process places on reframing. Pascale and Sternin outline three steps to reframing a problem:
Identify the conventional presentation of the problem. (E.g., "We don't have enough proper food for our children.")
Find out if there are exceptions to the norm, people in identical circumstances who seem to be coping especially well. (E.g., Yes, Mrs. X and Mrs. Y have healthy, well-fed children.")
Reframe the problem to focus on the exceptions. (E.g., "What are Mrs. X and Mrs. Y doing that's different?")
Reading the whole article will provide you with a range of helpful examples of reframing and of other aspects of the positive deviance process.
__________ 1 Richard Pascale is currently an associate fellow of Oxford University. Previously, he served for twenty years on the faculty of Stanford University's business school.
In an April 2006 post, I talked about the work Andrew McAfee, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, has done in analyzing the benefits to companies of business communication tools like blogs and wikis.
For many companies, these "Enterprise 2.0" collaboration tools are a revised approach to creating an intranet. Unlike many traditional intranets, the Enterprise 2.0 tools, properly set up, actually work, in the sense that they attract active participation and are generally easy to keep updated. The basic switch in platforms is from complex knowledge management software and one-to-many authoring, to easy-to-install software that enables many-to-many authoring.
To get a look at specifics of how some organizations are using tools like wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking, you can browse a slowly growing group of case studies posted at cases2.com, a site sponsored by McAfee and hosted by the social software vendor, Socialtext.
The cases themselves are presented using Socialtext's web-based wiki software. The submitters organize their stories by populating a template that includes these sections:
One sentence summary
Company information
Case description
Enterprise 2.0 solution
Results / Benefits
Hurdles / Challenges
Lessons learned
Screenshots
Information about the case — specifically, the name of the author, and any disclosures about relationships between the author and the company in the case, the technology vendor(s), etc.
Comments / questions from readers (virtually none, so far)
Among the cases you might want to check out:
The Angel.com case — illustrates how a company can implement wikis for communicating internally and with customers. This particular case was written by a Socialtext employee who did not get around to identifying hurdles and challenges and lessons learned, so the story is unfortunately incomplete.
The BUPA case — illustrates an application of social bookmarking to facilitate social networking, content management, and knowledge sharing. The iConcerina case, submitted by the same social bookmarking vendor, offers further useful tips.
The Citrix Community case — illustrates how an unofficial community can be created that fosters communication among employees, clients, and people at partner organizations. This case also enumerates hurdles that need to be anticipated and addressed.
The Intrawest case — illustrates how Enterprise 2.0 tools can help create solidarity among employees.
The Specialized Bicycle case — illustrates how use of online workspace can cut time to project completion, improve the accuracy of updates to information and status reports, and encourage transparency among team members in communicating their contributions to the joint effort.
The Uniglo case — illustrates an effective way of collecting timely feedback from hundreds of field locations (retail stores in this particular instance).
The YNNO case — illustrates how a consultancy can use an online knowledge sharing application as a document management system and collaboration platform.
I suspect that updates to the cases2.com site will be infrequent, but the cases already contributed provide a decent cross-section of applications of Enterprise 2.0 tools and, as such, are worth browsing.
As a follow-up to yesterday's post on facilitating informal learning, I'd like to call attention to thoughts on the subject that consultant Jay Cross, offered in the same October 2008 issue of Chief Learning Officer as contains the article I highlighted yesterday.
Cross provides a Before-and-After case study of knowledge management and informal learning at CGI, a Canadian IT outsourcing firm.
The Before situation was one of overly elaborate knowledge management infrastructure that didn't work.
The After situation was what CGI dubbed "Internet Inside," an enhanced intranet constructed internally using mostly open-source software. The purpose of Intranet Inside, which has a distinct Web 2.0 flavor, is to consolidate and make easily accessible the collective intelligence of CGI employees located in the 16 countries in which the company has offices.
As Cross explains,
CGI has dozens of communities of a hundred or so like-minded professionals. Groups have formed around topics such as Java, enterprise architecture, banking, insurance, dot-net and business intelligence. ...
Admission is by invitation only, limiting participation to like-minded individuals and keeping the groups to workable size. Participation in a community is based on need and qualifications.
... Every item that is shared as news is screened by a knowledgeable person before distribution to the group. ...
CGI has begun tagging all dialogues, not just by topic, but also by roles of the participants. A few years hence, CGI will have sufficient information to identify in-house experts based on past discussion.
Presumably, a further phase of informal learning at CGI will involve helping employees effectively tap into the expertise so identified.
The October 2008 issue of Chief Learning Officer has an informative summary by Agatha Gilmore of the importance of informal learning and of how organizations can best facilitate such learning.
The main theme of Gilmore's article is that informal learning, like anything else of significance to an organization, must be managed, but that the management must not be self-defeating. I.e., it makes no sense to use a management approach that bleeds most of the informality out of informal learning. As one interviewee puts it:
Facilitation is about putting in place the minimum level of systems and processes and providing, in some cases, evangelism to build energy around the subject without going too far in terms of trying to get in the middle of every discussion
Gilmore lists three requirements for effectively facilitating informal learning:
Creating a collaborative culture
Executive-level buy-in
Providing tools (which you keep as simple as possible) for:
organizing learning (e.g., communities of practice and online discussion forums)
easing the process of keeping published information up-to-date (e.g., blogs, wikis, and Web conferencing)
building communities, finding experts, and creating experts (notably, social networking)
As for managing the content that employees access, the goals should be making the time needed to find a particular bit of information as brief as possible, and ensuring that the information is accurate.
Training is also part of the story, but the objective is nothing more elaborate than making sure people know "what the tools are and how and when to use them." This equips them to make effective use of information that is relevant and accurate because it is being captured in ways that enable timely updating, something that is increasingly problematic for formal learning programs.
As Leonard and Swap explain in a 2005 interview,"deep smarts" is a term they coined
to express our belief that there's a certain subset of expertise that deserves to be identified by itself, because though it possesses many of the general characteristics of expertise it is also a very particular kind of expertise.
. . .
For one thing, it involves having an ability to recognize patterns based upon extensive experience, and so is very contextualized expertise. For example, someone who may have a lot of book learning but not a lot of real life experience won't be able to look at a new situation and say, "Aha, that reminds me of a time when I did X," and that memory suggests a way to act. So deep smarts are connected in a person's mind to rich context. There are a lot of tacit dimensions to this kind of practical wisdom, such as the person with deep smarts may not actually be able to recognize or to put into so many words where that knowledge came from — but is nonetheless able to react quickly and wisely.
One of the HBR article's exhibits provides an overview of Leonard and Swap's advice for helping a person develop deep smarts. The basic method guided experience, i.e., individual on-the-job coaching of the learner by someone who has already accumulated deep smarts. Leonard and Swap identify four particularly fruitful situations for such coaching:
The skills to be learned involve interpersonal relations, so there is no set of absolute steps but rather an array of possible responses to the actions and emotions of others. Examples: working with a board of directors, negotiating a merger or acquisition, handling a talented prima donna.
There are many tacit dimensions to the skills, so even an expert may not be able to make them all explicit. Examples: closing a sale, dissipating tension in a meeting, creating a new perfume or best-selling wine.
The knowledge is context-specific, so it's appropriate to be adaptive rather than apply formulas. Examples: managing in a foreign culture, manufacturing with proprietary, plant-specific equipment, handling sexual harassment cases.
The situation is new, so there is great uncertainty. Examples: launching a new service product in a new market, using a new mode of manufacturing.
The coach's job is to provide feedback as the learner is handling the above types of situations.
In the aforementioned interview, Leonard offers an example of a person with deep smarts who particularly resonated with me because he reminded me of one of my best teachers in graduate school:
In the [Deep Smarts] book, we tell a story about two missile companies competing in the 1980s for a government contract that if won would provide literally billions of dollars to the company over the subsequent 30 or 40 years. The two competitors sent up six prototype missiles but none of them was really up to the performance demanded. In one of these companies, a scientist who wasn't even on the project team — but who had 20 years of experience in building missiles — called the project team together in a large auditorium, because these are very big systems, requiring large development teams. Speaking without notes, the scientist proceeded to walk them through a complete redesign of the missiles from fore to aft, including software and hardware that he'd come up with on his own, working alone over the period of a week. And after they closed their mouths, because they were really in awe of his performance, the project team members realized that the implications of his redesign were that 400 people would have to work for a year and a half to make all the changes. Nevertheless, their faith in this guy was so strong and their understanding of the redesign and of everything that he'd proposed was so favorable that they went ahead. They won the contract and they still have it; so that's an example of how a person with deep smarts can save the day.
In Leonard and Swap's view, guided experience is actually a matter of having the learner recreate the knowledge in question (as opposed to transferring the knowledge in a "listen to me as I explain" fashion).
Developing and managing the mentoring relationship — Assess your readiness to act as a mentor and your interest in doing so. Assuming you decide mentoring is for you, link up with a mentee and get to know the person more deeply, including his/her career and personal goals. On an ongoing basis, you need to work on building trust, setting goals, and keeping the mentoring relationship productive and congenial.
Sponsoring — As needed, you open doors and advocate for your mentee to enable him/her "to develop new skills and gain meaningful visibility." Typical ways of sponsoring involve "seeking new opportunities for your mentee and connecting him or her with people in your network."
Guiding and counseling — To the degree it is helpful, you can be a confidant and sounding board for your mentee. "You may help your mentee explore and understand emotional reactions or personal conflict or explore ways to deal with problems." You should be ready to tactfully "warn your mentee about behavior that is a poor fit with organizational culture" or that is apt to elicit unwanted responses from others.
Protecting — Keep an eye out for potential threats to your mentee (e.g., problematic rumors) so that he/she can forestall them or prepare appropriate responses before problems have a chance to mushroom. "Protecting may also involve cutting red tape or helping your mentee avoid assignments that aren't a good fit."
Teaching — You transfer knowledge, share experiences, and use discovery techniques to help your mentee learn.
Modeling — Your mentee will learn from watching how you handle "ethics, values and standards; styles, beliefs and attitudes; methods and procedures." Keep in mind that your mentee will undoubtedly make adaptations that fit his/her position and personality.
Motivating and inspiring — You need to support and encourage your mentee, encouraging him/her to take on challenges, to learn, and to develop confidence. "When you help your mentees link their own goals, values and emotions to the larger organizational agenda, they become more engaged in their work and in their own development."
As you would expect, the CCL article makes a point of also listing the mentee's responsibilities. The most important of these are to be:
Honest and open.
Receptive to feedback and the mentor's insights.
Proactive about seeking information and feedback from the mentor and others.
Committed to following through, i.e., to pursuing goals, investing time in learning, and taking steps toward needed change.
Willing to give feedback to the mentor. "The mentee needs to be able to let the mentor know what is or isn't working well in the relationship. If there is a good feedback loop between both parties, the relationship will be more flexible, course corrections can be made, and the relationship will deepen."
You can read more about the value of mentoring in "Why Mentoring Matters in a Hypercompetitive World," an article by Thomas J. DeLong, John J. Gabarro, and Robert J. Lees that appeared in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review.
