Nudge

Carolyn is Director of Food Services at a large school in the US (I suppose that's the pc term for head dinner lady). Prompted by the way supermarkets layout their aisles, she experimented with the layout of the lunch choices on offer to the children. Without changing the menu, Carolyn made a dramatic impact on the take-up of healthier options chosen by the kids at the counter. This story is one of many related in the book 'Nudge', by Thomas Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago. I highly recommend it to anyone in the business of getting others to adapt their behaviour. I suspect that is all of us involved in organisational learning.

I have previously posted on the topic of 'Choice Architecture' here, but reading Nudge really brought home how the simplest changes can have significant impact on the decisions we, and others, take. With regard to knowledge sharing in an organisation, the book reminds us that it is the re-use part of the process that gives real personal satisfaction, not altruism. Think about the micro-buzz that you got when you saw 4 people had rated your hotel review on TripAdvisor as 'useful', or that someone had posted a comment on one of your photos on Flikr. The nudge suggested here is that a virtuous circle can be created if the system is set up so that
1. It is really easy to give qualitative feedback
2. The contributor can easily see that feedback

An edict from upstairs to 'share your stuff' is unlikely to make that happen. A nudge, such as being shown that your stuff is of value to others might.

Related articles

• Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein (futurelab.net)
• Can the 'nudge' agenda help the UK's businesses cut emissions? | Guy Newey (guardian.co.uk)

The Sunday Times Social List

Image by HowardLake via FlickrSteve Dale pointed out to me that the Sunday Times started a social 'wealth' index earlier this year. The Social List is a development along the lines of the Rich List.
Well, not quite.
The list takes four of the big online social networks (LinkedIN, Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook) and calculates your 'connectedness' and activity. It expresses the result as an index of 'social worth'. I always thought social worth was what you gave back to your community in the shape of volunteering, charity work and the like.

The list will undoubtedly appeal to the narcissists, but I couldn't help pointing it at my social networks (I belong to 3 of them, but not Foursquare). Surprisingly, out of over 47,000 people registered, I came out 27,344th. I was surprised because I almost never look at my Facebook account and rarely Tweet.

There are some obvious omissions in the social stock that the list looks at. There is no way that prolific bloggers with huge followings (including Steve), and users of other microblog sites, Ning, Flikr etc can add their preferred channels. In my mind, the most significant omission however is Google+. Google Circles was touted as the next big thing in social connectivity, but is notable by it's absence from the Sunday Times Social List.

How much knowledge do you need?

Something that I am commonly asked when training individuals in knowledge elicitation techniques is 'How much does one need to know about a topic to be to elicit valuable knowledge from 'experts'?'


The answer is 'not too much'. This is particularly true where the process includes a knowledge 'recipient'. Having an in-depth understanding of the subject-matter can be a significant limiting factor for a facilitator and at worst, reinforce commonly held misconceptions. An peer-expert conducting such an interview might be significantly inhibited in...

• Being able to ask the 'dumb fool questions'
• Asking for clarification or for examples to illustrate a point
• Recognising and testing assumptions, cultural or organisational norms
• Demystifying acronyms
• Questioning political expediency
  

All of these go towards validation of the knowledge being provided - a vital part of the process of knowledge transfer. Any resulting 'knowledge asset' should not make assumptions, for example that outputs that are generally accessible will only be used by someone who is already an expert.

Pamela Hinds of Stanford University describes experts' cognitive handicap as 'the curse of expertise'. In referring to education, the most obvious form of knowledge transfer, psychologist Susan Birch of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver says "to teach effectively, you need to see things from the naive perspective of the pupil - and the more knowledge you have acquired, the harder it becomes".

Of course it is important that the facilitator does their homework and has a good understanding of the topic area, the nature and scope of the work and a 'heads up' of any big issues to be explored later. Important avenues of enquiry or 'difficult' topics could be missed or avoided without this prior understanding. A skillful facilitator can recognize fruitful avenues of enquiry and probe for detail, without having a detailed understanding of the topic.

How much understanding? Just enough.

Liar, liar, pants on fire

If you are picked out at airport immigration as an 'unwelcome' visitor, you'd better hope that it is not as a result of a video-based eye tracker or pulse detector.

An article in last week's New Scientist suggested that attention to human factors, particularly speech, are always more accurate in the detection of untruths, than any technology that might be employed.


A study by psychologist Aldert Vrij at at the University of Portsmouth has shown just how much less accurate lie detectors (machines) are, than lie detectors (people). This is worrying, given the huge amount of investment by Homeland Security agencies in malintent indicator technologies. What people say and how they say it, turns out to be a significantly better indicator of veracity than visual cues.

And so it is with other forms of knowledge transfer. Many organisations invest heavily in 'virtual collaboration spaces' and 'knowledge sharing technology' without thinking much about the human determinants of how, why and if we share what we know. I was pleased to see that in the Xerox Parc Slideshare presentation on 'Knowledge Work 2020', this was strongly acknowledged in their prediction for how technology will impact work 10 years hence:

I came across this presentation whilst researching the topic for the KIN Autumn Workshop (which is also KIN's 10th Anniversary celebration) 'Knowledge at Work: Futures and Options'. Click here to see the full line up of great presenters and activities. This event will run over two full days, 14th and 15th September, with the first day being open to both KIN Alumni, and non-member guests who meet our membership criteria and are interested in seeing what KIN has to offer.

Network Visualisation and more

I attended a networking event organised by TFPL yesterday. If you know me well, you know I like playing with software tools, and I was intrigued by some tools mentioned by Jemima Gibbons, Author of "Monkeys with Typewriters: Myths & Realities of Social Media at Work".
You may have seen some or all of them before and I am sure there are others out there. I thought I'd have a quick play with some of them.

Linked IN
If you are a LinkedIn user, you might be interested in INmaps which enables you to visualise your network.

Here's mine:

http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/share/Phil_Ridout/196065024839027455648601768042894769074

Facebook
I'd not seen friendwheel before which generates images like this:

But another Facebook tool which did the rounds a few months back was Social Graph

Twitter
If you are a Tweeter, then you can understand your 'social capital' on that network by using Peerindex. I'm not a big Twitter user so the results for me are really not worth looking at. But if you are a Twitter user (and care about these things) then it may be worth a look
In the same vein we also have Klout which measures your 'Klout' across several networks.

These tools are all very well but what are the use cases ? When I look at the social graphs generated by InMaps and Social Graph, they don't tell me anything I didn't already know and there's no action I would take as a result of seeing these. But if I were trying to become known as a thought leader or 'influencer' in some field these tools might help me see if I was succeeding and suggest ways of increasing my reach. What would really be interesting is whether there are any similar such tools operating 'within the firewall' and how are they being used.

If you know of any such use cases then please come along to the Business Networking & Collaboration tools Roundtable (KIN Members only) on July 11th