Group items tagged

"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 you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. 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. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. 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 its 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 imitatio

'Upon my soul you mustn't come into the place saying you want to know, you know' Perhaps an early example of the need for a knowledge sharing strategy?

"As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field's researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know - or how they know it."

"For problems that are original, whose answers are not already known, and that require intuition, judgment and ingenuity, you need people. Smart people who not only know how to search, but who have the expertise and judgment to know whether what they've found is most relevant to solving the problem at hand."

"When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers. But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job (Does Joe know what he's doing?). The other is likability (Is Joe enjoyable to work with?). Obviously, both things matter. Less obvious is how much they matter-and exactly how they matter."

Fred Harriss is Britain's oldest backsmith. Still working at age 84, he has 74 years of wonderful experience. What a challenge helping Fred transfer that know-how would be.

he cigar-chomping reporter in the saggy brown suit with holes in his shoes and a nose for news is a stereotype that doesn't have much of a counterpart in today's real world. There's a new breed of investigative reporter in town: the geek who knows how to extract raw data from public sources, crunch the numbers, and spew out compelling analyses -- often with startling visuals to match.

The coming-of-age of artificial intelligence, 'social robots' and big data is having a massive impact on the way decisions are made in organisations. It follows that if we are to maximise know-how and expertise, the outputs from this technology-enabled channel must be integrated into how we work. Augmenting judgment and experience in this way also supports the move towards evidence-based decision making.

This TED talk from Daniel Kahneman has huge relevance for anyone involved in Knowledge Transfer or Knowledge Elicitation work. We know that an individual's recall and their actual experience may be quite different. This excellent talk shows just how different the 'remembering self' can be from the 'experiencing self'.  Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

"The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"-metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them."

Many of ReadWriteWeb's readers are old hands at Twitter, but the service gets thousands of new users every day. That includes a lot of folks who suddenly need to use Twitter as part of their job. If you're just being introduced to the joys of Twitter (or introducing it to another user), here's a short and friendly primer on what you need to know about using the site.

Excellent short article on the difference between learning and knowing

Reframing - the key to buy-in?  Rory Sutherland talks eloquently and convincingly about how you position a situation determines how it is received. Essential stuff if you are trying to convince senior people of the worth of your endeavours. Sutherland is one of the leading thinkers in advertising today, so knows what he is talking about.

If you want to move know-how around, this is a great model.If you thought business innovation was lacklustre, this is the extreme end - but it clearly works.

There is so much unverified 'noise' on the web that it is difficult to know what to trust. Storyful attempts to provide some veracity to video stories.

Article on senior managers' 'Personal Knowledge Infrastructure'. Davide Nicolini, Prof of Organizational Studies at Warwick Business School and Director of KIN

"'Knowledge creation trumps knowledge transfer' 'Diversity trumps ability' 'Diversity across firms trumps diversity within companies' These are some of the themes explored in this interesting article from Business Week Magazine. The Las Vegas casino Hurrahs is tapping into the power of prediction markets specifically to innovate. The importance of particular kinds of diversity are also explored. If you want to know more about Prediction Markets, we are building a considerable KIN resource on this here and the KIN Quarterly Workshop on 2nd December will cover this topic. Thanks go to Jenny Ambrozek for pointing out this fascinating article. "

Wall Street journal / MIT Sloane Management Review article. How emerging markets are leading the way in thinking about markets in a downturn. The examples mainly come from marketing and product placement, but these are great lessons in how to think differently about an existing business model. The batteries pricing / packaging example was a neat way of presenting an existing offering in a more attractive & acceptable way during a downturn. The item about focussing on your existing customer base rather than new market opporunities got me thinking about how we use existing knowledge. The analogy works for me, because leveraging what we already know makes more sense than the cost of buying in expertise etc.