The Pickle Problem - applying market economics to knowledge sharing and collaboration

I'm a fan of National Public Radio's podcast 'Planet Money'. Last week they ran a 15 minute episode on how the distribution of produce donated to food banks in the US was transformed by an ingenious market solution. By the way, that's an economic market, not a produce market. 

The issue was illustrated by the need to get fresh fruit and veg to Alaskan food banks, when the perception was that long-distance chilled transportation was problematic. Hence an abundance of pickles in Alaskan food banks and an oversupply of potatoes in Idaho.

A centralized distribution network across charities had been set-up but, as with many centrally planned economies, was inefficient, slow and lacked local knowledge. The solution, described in this excellent podcast, was of the creation of 'Feeding America's economic trading market in both food and logistic solutions. The design, based on a kind of eBay, uses 'fake money' or shares, distributed for free to all food banks. They can spend this on donated produce or trade to move donations that are an over-supply or not needed at that place or time. You know that little buzz you get when you win an item on eBay; apparently participants get that when they 'win' a truckload of peanut butter (long shelf-life, not fragile, high in protein and kids love it).

It is an elegant, efficient and despite many doubters, very successful system. Not only that, but it connected many different people involved in food banks, produce production, supply and logistics. An unintended outcome was the creation of a Feeding America knowledge bank as well an efficient food distribution system.

'Knowledge markets' within large organisations tend to rely on 'if we build it, they will come', tech platforms or altruism. Could a free-market economy of the kind tried and tested in Feeding America's program, apply to knowledge sharing and learning lessons in large organisations and other networks? Could 'knowledge shares' be used as behavioural economics to incentivise collaboration? I'm acutely aware of unintended consequences, such as hoarding or gaming the system. These were uppermost in the system designed for Feeding America, but who would have thought that applying free-market economics to a charitable social enterprise would work? I'm co-facilitating the KIN Workshop 'Knowledge in Action' tomorrow which will focus on behavioural economics; I hope we have the chance to explore this idea. Do you know of organizations or networks that have tried applying market-forces to knowledge sharing?

Do take 15 minutes of your day to listen tohttp://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/25/457408717/episode-665-the-pickle-problem

Move along there - Service Design Thinking

When looking in Google's toybox, I came across the wonderful Google Trends. In preparing for the recent KIN Webinar on 'Why Design Thinking will Save Knowledge Management" with Arno Boersma, I thought I would compare the frequency of headlines over the last 10 years for the phrases 'Knowledge management' and 'Design Thinking'.

'Design thinking' puts the customer/consumer right at the heart of every process, making engagement and satisfaction much more likely.  In recent years, investment in good product design has proven it's worth  (iPhone, Dyson, Alessi etc). Good design as applied to services tends to focus on the web (Google Search, heylululemon, TripAdvisor). Of course the smartphone is increasingly a 'service carrier'. But what about healthcare systems, tackling radicalisation or even entire organizational redesign? IBM are doing just that - they are training much of their management workforce in design thinking and are employing over 1000 designers.

The KM term may drop off the graph, but the fundamentals of Service Design Thinking - empathy, iteration, experimentation (with a tolerance for failure) and collaboration are critical for the future of knowledge sharing in an increasingly complex and busy world.

If you are looking for a great primer in design thinking, I heartily recommend the September cover story of the Harvard Business Review 'Design Thinking Comes of Age' https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age

Knowledge Needs Action To Create Value

The theme for the forthcoming KIN Workshop (1st December 2015) is "Knowledge in Action". Hopefully a title that will resonate with anyone who practices knowledge management, since it reminds us that knowledge without some form of action is worthless.

We consume knowledge in a variety of ways, e.g. through academic courses, reading or experiential learning. But what's the use of all of this accumulated knowledge while it remains dormant in our heads, or stored on our bookshelves? We can only realise the value of knowledge if we do something with it, and we all know that "to do" is a verb. So knowledge plus some form of action will release value.

Readers will have noticed that I've used a stock image (with permission) by John Antonios which is a variation of my equation, i.e. knowledge plus action equals power, which perhaps give more emphasis to this 'knowledge + action' dynamic, but I prefer to think of value rather than power, partly because some people may associate "power" as "self empowerment". And no doubt we can all think of examples (mostly bad) where that has happened throughout history....or in our workplace?!

Value is a different matter, because it can't be personalised or self-attributed; it's a measure of the benefit that might be gained by other people, for example from goods or a service.

One of the simplest ways of creating value from knowledge is by sharing it. We may not realise what value has been created by sharing our knowledge. We don't know what decisions we have influenced or the impact of those decisions. We can sometimes recognise the value of something we've said or done by the reactions of others, or the feedback we've received over time, but that's not always the case.

Speaking for myself, I've learnt far more from people than I've ever learnt from books, though I don't wish to dismiss books as a very useful source of knowledge. However, the power of tacit knowledge can't be underestimated, and we've never had better opportunities to tap into this knowledge through our networks - personal, private and social.  Belonging to and growing these networks is no longer an option; it's an absolute essential if we want to ensure our knowledge and skills are continually honed and adapted to the rapidly changing environment around us. Darwin called it evolution, but it's more fundamental than that, it's about surviving.

So, coming back to the point about knowledge and value. Knowledge without action has no value. We can be the brightest and most intelligent person we know, but unless we do something with this knowledge we are as useful a chocolate tea-pot (I think that might be a British idiom, but I hope the meaning is apparent).  Doing means sharing, helping, supporting, tacit-to-explicit, speaking, mentoring, teaching....I'm sure you can think of many other action verbs. Doing nothing with our knowledge is an opportunity wasted, and our net worth (value) equals nothing, zero, zilch.

I'm looking forward to the KIN Workshop in December, and listening to the knowledge being shared by our line-up of presenters and facilitators, the knowledge shared between delegates during lunch and coffee breaks and doing my bit to share. For those unable to be with us, knowledge sharing doesn't end at the workshop. It's made available on-line (explicit), the action verb in this case is - you've guessed - "published".

I can't yet put a figure on the value of all of this shared knowledge, but I know we're going to have a room full of knowledge, plenty of actions, so one thing for sure is that lots of knowledge + lots of actions = lots of value!

Hope to see you at the workshop or online.

Steve Dale

Just bad luck? HBR article on organisational learning (or lack of it)

Bad luck omikuji tied to ropes at the Yasaka shrine (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Be honest - when you experience a failure, how much to you attribute to bad luck, timing or circumstance? How much to your own competence? 'Attribution bias' and other factors that may inhibit our learning are referred to in this excellent HBR article on organisational learning (or lack of it).  https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-organizations-dont-learn

Thanks to Daan Boom of https://collaboration.worldbank.org/ for highlighting this article

Maximising your network or community participation - it's not what you think

You may have heard it referred to as 80:20:10, the Pareto effect or something similar. I'm talking about the phenomenon that only a small proportion of your community or network are active contributors, the remainder being 'lurkers' or 'freeloaders'. An obvious example is the ratio of Wikipedia contributors to readers. 

One would think that getting the majority or all your community members to be active would be a good thing. However, crowdsourcing research by Zoran Levnajic at the University of Lubljana has shown that there is an optimum level of participatory effectiveness. Counterintuitively, it's not to get everyone to participate.

"Modern information technologies allow for massive number of subjects to be involved in a more or less spontaneous way. We introduce a modeling framework through which we study the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in relation to the level of collectivism in facing the problem. Our findings reveal an intricate relationship between the number of participants and the difficulty of the problem, indicating the the optimal size of the group"

With typical active-contribution rates for networks at around 10%, clearly efforts to increase participation are necessary and worthwhile. We can however take some comfort from this study showing that having a large proportion of potential contributors or consumers (I prefer these terms to the pejorative 'freeloaders') is actually a good thing. 

Which of your networks get close to Levnajic's magic 50% active participation rate?

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  Written by

  Gary Colet

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