Change of Location: August Meeting with Dave Snowden

Due to the interest in this meeting, please note that the August 11th meeting will move to 101 North Wacker, 13th floor (YMCA) in order to accomodate more people. 5:30pm - 7:30 pm.

We look forward to seeing everyone!

August Meeting: 7 Principles of Knowledge Management

Tuesday, August 11th: 5:30pm
For location details, see right-hand column. Please note, there will be no meeting at Allstate for this event.

Dave Snowden will join us downtown to lead a discussion on his “7 Principles of Knowledge Management,” summarized below:

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but not knowledge.
• We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act.
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice it’s impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts.
• Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making. He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complexity.

He is currently leading a series of experimental programmes to create a new approach to measuring impact in public services, in the areas of health, education and social policy. This has involved the design of a new research tool to capture qualitative and quantitative data in social contexts using self-signifed narrative, based on ethnographic principles. This is currently in pilot with the UK Government, the Government of Singapore together with a major hospital in New York and various Indigenous projects in Australia.

He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period he was selected by IBM as one of six “on-demand” thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.

His company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants.

KM Chicago July Social Event

Please link here to respond to the eVite for this event

This year for our July annual social event we will be taking a boat ride from Wendella Boats. Each person who wants to attend should buy their own ticket online at www.wendellaboats. com. Buy tickets for the combined river and lake cruise that leaves at 6 PM on Tuesday, 14 July. The boat ride is an architectural tour and will travel on the Chicago River as well as Lake Michigan. The trip lasts 90 minutes. Snacks and drinks are available for purchase on the boat.

I suggest buying your tickets on line right away as these trips sometimes sell out. I also suggest arriving at the dock 15 minutes before departure.

The dock is located at the base of the Wrigley Building at 400 N. Michigan Ave. You will descend a set of stone steps to the dock. Following the boat ride we will move to Catch 35 for dinner. The restaurant is at 35 W. Wacker Dr. in the ground floor for the Leo Burnett Building. A 5 minute walk from the boat dock. Our reservations are at 7:45 under my name (Randy Russell). I have reserved space for 15 people and I can change the number as necessary. Catch 35 has a wide variety of food for every taste but the focus is seafood. Their website is www.catch35. com.

You may attend the boat ride, dinner or both. Please let me know whether or not you will be joining us for dinner so I can be sure to have sufficient seating. There is valet parking at Catch 35 for $10 after 5 PM. You may also take a water taxi from the train stations for $2 right to the Wendella Boats area.

I hope to see on Tuesday, 14 July.

Rreturn on Information eBook from Dow Jones

A nice complement to the presentation on June 9.

JUNE MEETING - VIRTUAL ONLY

PLEASE NOTE: JUNE MEETING IS COMPLETELY VIRTUAL. NO MEETING DOWNTOWN OR IN NORTHBROOK!
Tuesday, June 9: Measuring ROI: an Award-Winning Accenture Case Study
Stephen Kaukonen, Accenture

Measuring and understanding the impact that knowledge sharing is having on an organization can be complex and time consuming. Using a case study from Accenture, this presentation takes a look at its KM measurement model approach and the impact that knowledge sharing has on its organization. It illustrates how to build and implement a framework for measuring the impact of KM initiatives, including calculation of ROI (return on investment). The Accenture study was recognized as the “2007 Best Impact Study” by the ROI Institute.



As a Senior Manager within Accenture’s knowledge management practice, Mr. Kaukonen is responsible for driving several global initiatives related to collaboration and knowledge sharing – primarily around the acquisition of content and the marketing and communications of our capabilities to the practice. He is also responsible for the metrics and measurement capabilities related to knowledge sharing. Mr. Kaukonen has been with Accenture (a global consulting, technology and outsourcing company) for 17 years - with 13 years of knowledge management related experience. He started in July of 1992 working within Accenture's consulting practice. In 2000, he transitioned into the Financial Services Knowledge Management team where he worked for the next 7 years as a content manager - helping to enable the Financial Services practice with the knowledge they needed to help clients become high performance businesses. In 2007, Mr. Kaukonen transferred to the Global Knowledge Management team helping to create the future of collaboration and knowledge sharing area at Accenture.

Dial-in: 877-659-4152, PIN 8667037 and http://tinyurl.com/4v2prf