Room 101

Jay Cross comments on a post by JP Rangaswami about Facebook and its potential in companies. What interests me is this:

More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

That’s how we are going to create the right learning environments. I think Facebook has the tools to capture much of this in the nonintrusive time-shifted place-shifted shareable way. Let the patterns emerge. Share the patterns. Get inside people’s heads.

Why get inside my head? Do you not trust me to share the knowledge we both need? It appears not. I really dont want people inside my head. And least of all my employer. In a knowledge economy my employer is buying what is "inside my head".

The above may be caricature, but what is transparency if we cannot choose when to be transparent. In the workplace, our value is individual, that is what each worker sells, it is what makes you employable. That value requires that the choice of what is shared remains with the individual. We all intuitively know this, and this is why this kind of tendency will not take, there will always be passive resistance. Sharing is not located in the tools, it is an attitude, and that involves changing the way business works, which is a very very tall order.

Until that change happens business will waste money on these tools and wonder why people are cagey. But sharing needs work both ways. If an employee shares and the company doesnt, more often using what is shared for "share"holder benefit (the dissonance between share as a verb vs share as a noun is a question for another day), then the employee soon stops sharing. Or rather the employee learns to pay the same lip-service to sharing as the company does.

The knowledge management literature, and the glorious chaos that is called Web 2.0, implicitly recognise the value and the power of the individual embedded within a social network. Companies do not. In the final analysis, that bottom line, the individual is explicitly viewed by the company/organisation/entity, (whatever individuals, CEOs or middle managers may do or think) as a "resource". People viewed as resources tend to keep the things that matter to themselves. Sure they will dance for your project, the usual sticks and carrots will apply, but in the same way as they always did. In other words, the contractual obligation. Web 2.0 in this context changes nothing.

This is arguably a stumbling block that can be easily massaged with figures. We can pretend it works, and people will play the game, and pretend to share. If you want more than superficial participation, Web 2.0 will facilitate that, but only if the company understands that participation cant be limited to the work processes, it needs to be wider, and especially, economic. And that means addressing the contract. Meanwhile Web 2.0, in companies is probably just another fad.

Buy-in vs acceptance

In answer to Nancy’s comments on my last post. I agree that the idea of the community of practice is a useful lens, a way of understanding, and to those who have got it, like any lens it does change your perceptions. It can be quite hard to get back from there to where you were before because the change is radical.

This is what I mean when I talk about buy-in vs acceptance. The terms could be substituted for others. Another way of describing it would be to say it is like the difference between buying a corset and changing your diet: cosmetics vs the way you live. Talking about the community of practice with small and medium companies, I have often found that there is a framing problem. The circumstances are usually some kind of conversation or interview about training, so usually the frame is that I am going to suggest some kind of action that will take place outside the usual daily routine of the company, and have some kind of measurable result. They are looking to buy some kind of solution, and though often open to innovations and other ways of doing things, the expectation is often that these will be self contained. When I present the idea of cultivating informal community of practice processes, that will integrate into the very fabric of their business processes, then there is usually a conflict. This is not just a new idea they can “buy into”, see if it works, and move on if necessary. What is proposed, stripped of the language we may use to make it accessible, is a radical shift in the way learning and knowledge are understood. To accept that shift goes a long way beyond simply, and pragmatically, buying a service that they can later take or leave.

This idea of change is perhaps familiar to many educators. The work of Rogoff or Bruner, for example, and the idea of learning as a transformation of identity are quite well-known now . Learning , viewed from this perspective (and the CoP perspective), involves a process of personal shift, and as a result, I would suggest, organizational shift . It is not so much that it is required as that it happens.

It is perhaps therefore understandable that the reaction when I present these ideas is often as if I were opening Pandora’s box. It could be understood as the difference between training and learning, but my perception is that the people I talk to see training as a situation in which learning happens; they don’t separate them, which further clouds the issue.

So it seems to me that though educators may have clear ideas about the value of idea of the community of practice and how it could help as a way of understanding and facilitating learning, we very often face a fundamental and undeclared problem that centres on the way in which the whole activity is framed. In the workplace and, I would argue, in many school and university contexts.

Perhaps the way to address this issue is to try to address the attitudes and understandings that inform the way they frame training/learning. This is not always easy in a 20 minute pitch. And though you may awaken interest it may more often be "buy-in", which might be described as a misunderstanding of what you are proposing, than full acceptance. They believe they are buying a service, and you are offering substantial change. And that tends to cause problems further down the line. The implication is that we need stronger, longer relationships in order to reach understanding. A tall order, since current business and organizational dynamics tend to militate against the kind of reflection and dialogue necessary for that….we do need stories about this...

I have gone on far too long. This is a blog!! I’ll get my coat!