Richard McDermott Tragedy of the Knowledge Commons @ KMWorld

Richard McDermott designing knowledge organizations. Will talk about the Knowledge Commons. I’ve record it. This didn’t do a lot for me. I’ve added my new thoughts at the end of the piece.

Starts sharing a story about clients and nine questions to think about. I will call it an oil company. First it is an award winning KM co.
1) Computerization, when they made a map it was a precious commodity. Sense of ownership of that knowledge. Now things have changed. All the maps are computerized in development. So waht that means. People make millions of versions of tehse maps. Which is the final version. The info is now more complex for each map has different assumptions.
2) Connectivity. In the old days geologists will stand round the map. Now they are globalized, most meetings are virtual meetings. They all start late because someone can’t get hooked up. Because it lends itself to presetatio.. they are more connected but the connection is less deep. We can’t need 50 people to do this project. At the end of the count they all needed to be there.
3) Globalization. Old days. look in files to find some analogs to get some ideas. Now they hae access to huge global knowledge bases. As a result each scientists must sort more information. which ersion to use is much more diffilcult. They are constantly looking for which thing to look at. More to sort, more complex, and connectivity had increased the transaction time. Result reduction in collaboration time. More knowledge bu no time to consider it. They feel more idsolated and alone tha ever before. They find less time to think, the documentation etc.. hard to figure out how the decisions were made.

Found at a number of companies have worked. A junkyard of information. In 1833 william foster loydd wrote a book on population and wrote about grazing sheep on common land. When individuals stewarded their own land they sustained less. When we look at KM today it seems we are looking at the Tragedy of the Commons.

The problem is… this issue is likely to explode. more complexity, more connectivity, more published, more data. etc. An incredible explosion. The kinds of forces we cannot manage with traditional KM systems. How do we deal with it? How do we deal with that?

Here are some questions to think about. What you could think about on an individual level
What if:

• we batched our time so we could manage interruptions. I think we are becoming victims! (questions I wonder!)
• we selectively applied our full attention to the task at time. (it’s ok to half listen???)
• we used less information when we make decisions when we know what we are doing.
• rather than using best practices we looked for precedences. What did they learn? Are there different approaches to answer the same problem.
• you looked beyond your realm? what if you connected with others that do things very differently?
• you could ignore or forget? (added by audience)

On the Organizational Side.
What if km strategies in the organization … What if they:

• create pressure strong enough to compete for attention? How do you keep the energy going? write white papers? compete for peoples attention.
• should you make managing critical documents someone’s job? Get someone to mind the store
• what if they gave people the room, expectation to aid thinking. What would the tools be? It is not about controlling professionals. Created a guiding framework for different parts of the process. A set of guidelines etc.
• where do you need to deepen expertise? where do you want to develop deep levels of deep expertise. You need some real mechanisms.

Maybe it is the end of the day. This session really hasn’t taken me very far. It fails to really target how we share information. I don’t see flow in these examples. I see it as looking back as opposed to forward. There is too much focus on time re communities of practice etc. One of the issues is these example never leverage concepts around “beta” or using examples like user generated content. There is no sense of strategy here re harnessing the users, the customers, and using them as part of the collective intelligence of the organization. The focus here remains too internally focused. Part of the discussion must become more focused on “letting go of control”. The marketers are beginning to learn, some tech co’s have learned how to partner and cooperate. Harnessing the ecosystem by facilitation rather than control may just be one way forward.

Richard says he will send a copy of the article. Why not just put it on a blogsite.