KIN 10th Anniversary Event

Last week, KIN celebrated 10 successful years with a 2 day event at Warwick Business School.
As well as current members, we decided that many others had contributed to KIN's success, so invited everyone in the KIN Alumni Group to the first day and the Awards Dinner.  It was great that so many took the time to participate and it was lovely to catch up with some old faces. One of the exercises was for everyone to post up their reflections of significant knowledge or innovation events over the last 10 years.

 

Later on, after we had a scary but exciting glimpse of what the future world of work might look like from David Smith, we asked everyone to post their ideas for what the next decade might look like.

 

It was nice that so many of the KIN Associates could join us from all round the world, including Ian Corbett, Nick Milton, Carlota Vollhardt and Richard McDermott. Carlota and Richard performed admirably in a staged debate. I still can't decide whether the motion 'Social Media is making us dumb' was actually passed or not, but that wasn't the point; getting us to think about it in an amusing and engaging way was. Good stuff.

The KIN Awards Dinner was a hoot. There was some well-deserved recognition for items such as Most Q&A Forum Contributions and too many others to mention. Just look at the sort of excitement receiving a KIN Award generates!

Our keynote speaker on day 2 was Charles Leadbeater, who got us to think deeply about whether we do things 'for' people or 'to' people. He used the qualities of Barcelona FC and Johan Cruyff's leadership as a model for behavioural change. Even for a non-footbalist the analogy worked very well.

Thanks must also go to all the other speakers; Harry Scarbrough & Davide Nicolini of WBS, Steve Cassidy of BT,  Laurence Lock Lee via Skype from Australia, Eddie Obeng for the most energised post lunch talk ever, Helen Mullinder and John Day of Sellafield, Karen Shergold of PwC, and Andrew Parker for his fascinating analysis of the new KIN Social Network Analysis. It is nice to hear that the network is strong and getting stronger!

The entire 2 day event was 'captured' for us in real-time on an enormous wall panel by Vanessa Randle of ThinkingVisually.

Reflecting on this workshop, I think one of the reasons that participants in the network get so much out of it is, quite simply, it's enjoyable. Here's to the next 10 years of developing new insights into organisational learning and innovation at KIN.

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.