Comments on: SoMe and KM lessons learned — more from E2.0

By: Patti

Patti — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:02:04 +0000

Thanks so much for your thoughtful response here. You are right, of course, that everyone has to make their own journey of learning and what we see on stage are those people who are willing to share where their own journeys have brought them. That is the internalization part.

But, still, I would have liked to hear at least one person say, “When we started to think about implementing Enterprise 2.0, we talked with [our] people who had been working with knowledge management over the past 10 years, and were able to bootstrap our activities more effectively because of what they had learned.”

By: Gordon Ross

Gordon Ross — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:54:10 +0000

I think there’s some rich irony about knowledge work and the crux of what we try to accomplish with social software in your comment, “And yet, speaker after speaker at E2.0 talked about these lessons without reference to the accumulation of learning within the knowledge management community (from which I believe many of these same folks came)” — which perhaps gets to the deeper reality of the type of learning that occurs when going through these projects. As Dave Snowden might say, you only know what you know when you need to know it. The internalization aspect of the knowledge (to reference the somewhat debated SECI model) tends to produce the same kind of outputs (socialization/externalization) every year at conferences of this sort as people go through the learning process associated with E2 type projects.

Said another way, in English this time, people experience similar aspects of project work and have a need to articulate the lessons they’ve learned, which, upon accumulation and reflection, all look quite similar. And prompt us to wonder, “Is any of this stuff new?”

I take it to be a signifier of where people are at in terms of their stage of… maturity(?) [not the right word] in their journey through these difficult problems. Like every novice who becomes an intermediate and then gains deep appreciation for the nature of the domain in which their working, we go through similar states of being and feel the need to share these lessons learned, which can sound like truisms and platitudes. “Man, change management is hard.”

Of course, we hear them so frequently at conferences, where one person’s anecdotes blend into another’s and we so often lack a language to articulate what it really means when e say things like “it was hard”, it winds up sounding cliched or recycled or tired. But to the person who lived the *hardness* of change management, it’s different. It was hard. They have the scars to prove it. They know that. And their way of knowing about change management (for example) is now fundamentally different as a result. It isn’t just someone else’s knowledge, after all, it has become tacit for them, a way of knowing.

BTW, nice to chat with you at the booth at e2conf Patti.

By: Larry Baumgart

Larry Baumgart — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:11:03 +0000

whole heartedly agree

By: James Dellow

James Dellow — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 05:16:21 +0000

Of course KM and the body of knowledge, practices and experiences it created are still valid – its a great platform to stand on. If anything we are continuing on this journey be adding even more new ideas into the mix – e.g. design and visual thinking. However, there is one point of difference in Enterprise 2.0 and now in Social Business – technology is not rejected, we’ve just worked out how we need to use it.

By: Larry Baumgart

Larry Baumgart — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:09:25 +0000

I am on my third startup. Your bullet points above were true when I started the first and are still true on my third. Thanks for reminding me that some things don’t change.

By: Nick Milton

Nick Milton — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 16:42:55 +0000

excellent post, thanks, raises many pertinent questions

By: Bill Ives

Bill Ives — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:33:34 +0000

Patti

You comments about KM are so spot on. I kept saying to people next to me at the conference that many of the messages could be (and were) 1995 KM. I added that this is not necessarily a bad thing as many issues remain relevant but we should acknowledge the past and also learn from it. Great post. Thanks.