Endless Knots

"Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On"

Yesterday, it was The New York Times reporting on Fort Leavenworth's commanding general, Frontier 6, blogging again. Today, it's NYT's Noam Cohen reporting on (that same) General Bill Caldwell's group that has organized wikis for writing Army doctrine.

This is without doubt the most progressive thing we've learned about that the Army is doing. Anyone with a login to the Army's online network can now just click to "collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life."

The three-month pilot is being run out of Battle Command Knowledge System, one of the handful of units that General Caldwell brought together, known collectively as Combined Arms Center-Knowledge. The idea behind CAC-K is that there is synergy when a group of knowledge-related organizations collaborate. Among the groups comprising CAC-K is the prestigious publication, Military Review, the Center for Army Lessons Learned (the home of After Action Reviews), the Combat Studies Institute, the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, and Battle Command Knowledge System (which has been responsible for supporting the Army's famous "forums," aka communities of practice).

The Doctrine Directorate, known as CADD, and the Knowledge System group, known as BCKS, are collaborating to oversee the creation of the wikis. According to Colonel Chuck Burnett, who took over BCKS last October:

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki. The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

Clint Ancker, himself a retired colonel who heads up CADD, "Under the new plan, 50 or so capstone guides will remain field manuals and will not be open to collaborative editing...More than 200 other former field guides are likely to be consolidated or even scrapped."

Think about it. The Army is looking to its employees to develop policy. After all, the employees are the ones who have to carry it out. As I've said a time or two when companies resist some of these new-fangled ideas, if the Army can do it, so can you.

NB: Here's a link to Jeff Stamps's and my presentation at the last Army Operational Knowledge Management Conference in 2008, organized by BCKS.

Enterprise 2.0: Leading Collaborative Teams

Having spent the past two centuries working on this topic, it seemed only  appropriate to organize a panel at Enterprise 2.0. Thus, we've convinced two of our favorite colleagues, Virginia Adamson from Volvo IT and Mike Prevou from Strategic Knowledge Solutions to schlep to Boston and hold forth with us.

We've carried on projects with both Virginia and Mike over the past few years. Each is doing different but related things to make it easier for distant teams to work together. Here's the scoop. Another panel worth attending:

Leading Collaborative Teams: How Volvo IT and the US Army Enhance Performance with New Behaviors and Tools #e2conf41 (Location: Carlton)

Wednesday, June 24 - 3:30 pm–4:30 pm

What happens when enterprises take a broader approach to collaboration? These two organizations—the global technology provider for one of the world's leading enterprises and the knowledge unit of one of the world's preeminent military units—chose to invest in both technology and people. Their experiences incorporate new behaviors that are critical to driving true collaboration alongside new ways to use tools, such as SharePoint. In both cases, unusually high levels of performance have followed from their approaches.

Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge

(Enough already about me)

Jessica Lipnack writes, speaks, and consults about collaboration. Co-author of six books, she is an expert on virtual teams, networked organizations, and social media. A long-term member of the Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board, she stays in touch with a wide network of practitioners and thinkers, including the participants in her sessions.

Speaker - Jeffrey Stamps, Chief Scientist, NetAge

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.**

Jeff Stamps is co-author of numerous books and articles, including Virtual Teams and The Age of the Network. His early insights into what makes collaboration work have been picked up by organizations around the world, including Volvo and the US Army, where he has designed methods and tools for cross-boundary work that drive extraordinary performance.

Speaker - Michael Prevou, Phd, LTC, US Army Retired and Chief of Knowledge Strategies and Innovation, SKS, Inc.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Mike Prevou specializes in collaboration for knowledge and learning solutions. He has been involved with numerous collaboration initiatives for the Army, including being responsible for designing, deploying and maintaining Army communities of practice; developing knowledge assessment process; and co-authoring and leading workshops around the Battle Command Knowledge Systems' "Teams of Leaders Handbook." A 24-year Army veteran, he holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Kansas along with two master's degrees and leads numerous transformational change initiatives both within the Army as well as other organizations.

Speaker - Virginia Adamson, Senior Business Consultant, Content & Collaboration Services, Volvo Information Technology

With more than 25 years in the Volvo Group and an Engineering background, Virginia Adamson has experience ranging from product development to business and strategy development. She has worked for AB Volvo, Volvo Trucks and Volvo Information Technology in Greensboro, NC, as well as Gothenburg and Umeå in Sweden. In her current position Virginia provides consulting services to help customers develop collaboration strategies, utilize collaboration tools, and learn to work more effectively across all boundaries whether cultural, organizational, or geographical.

**Jeff at work

"Let's take that online" -- Boston KM Forum

Lovely day spent with the Boston KM Forum's "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, et al. Here's the group, snapped with my phone, just as Jeff and I started our tap dance on virtual teams.

We were followed by WBUR's New Media Director, Ken George, who showed how blurry the lines have become between different kinds of media. Here he asks whether what he's pointing to is a radio program or a web page. The answer? Both - plus a lot more because it's also a place for listeners to participate.

Next up, Suzanne Minassian who took us inside IBM's social media developments. I looked around the room while she was talking and realized that social media had taken over the crowd as a number of people were tweeting as she spoke (including yours t.). Narry a laptop in sight. A big change from just a year ago, when live blogging was the advance guard at this event.

After lunch, Sadie Van Buren from Knowledge Management Associates got best-in-show for her truly beautiful slides. Her four rules for social media are worth repeating (which I tweeted in real time, natch): reciprocate, meaning that it's wise to acknowledge all that comes your way, socially speaking; comment on what you "like" when perusing social sites because this adds to the ongoing promotion of good stuff out there; follow back/accept friend requests/link when people do the same for you (within reason, she pointed out, because the self-promoters will always be out there selling you snake oil); and give it away, meaning post, provide, share, and all the other positive tendencies that are in our nature when we're feeling good about ourselves.

Now to the reason for the title of this post: after our presentation, someone came up to me (apologies to whomever it was and please comment should you see this) to talk about a key point I made about conference calls. Status reporting, research indicates, is one of the worst uses of conference calls. Precious real time should be saved for the tough stuff - disagreements, decisions, conflict resolution, that kind of messiness. Whoever the brilliant person was who spoke to me pointed out that when things get tense on a call, people often say, "Let's take that offline," which led us to agree that the tendency should be just the opposite. Instead, best practice should be to "take that online," air the differences, and move beyond the problem as quickly as possible.

Thanks, all. Great day, and a big round of applause for Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait, who do the heavy lifting for these events.

Twitter in plain English

You know I'm a fan of the folks at Common Craft, who have the unique ability to translate the strange world of new media into words that just-plain-folks can understand. They have a whole series of "...in plain English" videos, some of which I've written about here.

While writing a description of an upcoming Twitter session that I'm moderating for the Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston June 22-25, I found this one, which I'm posting for everyone who's asked me about Twitter, Web 2.0, or anything else that wasn't a word, phrase, or idea, say, 20 minutes ago.

Be advised: this explanation focuses on the use of Twitter with friends. There are countless other uses - from emergency work to news to marketing to customer service to...you name it. Keep it short and it Twitters just fine.

Obama tops leadership picks with Intelligence

Intelligence is the bookend to President-elect Obama's nominating process that began with his naming people to key economic positions in November. Last week, PEBO named Leon Panetta as Director of CIA, Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan as both Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism.

While the CIA and National Intelligence are independent federal agencies, Brennan's outfit is part of the Executive Office of the President run by the Chief of Staff. Tracking down who reports to whom is its own intelligence operation so we think we've got this right when we submit that Brennan probably will report to Jim Jones, who, as National Security Advisor, is slated to run the National Security Council.

(FYI, all this national security apparatus is the result of the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps it's time for an update as, shall we say, things have changed a bit in the subsequent years.)

Although these are by no means all of them, the DNI coordinates 16 intelligence-related agencies scattered throughout the US government, ranging from CIA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the US Coast Guard. On the US Gov map, we represent these agencies as having dotted-line/matrix reports to the DNI, relationships that show up as cross-links running from the cluster that we label "FEDERAL AGENCIES" (you can find it at about 2 o'clock when you lick on the map) to other parts of the government. While the position was touted as an "intelligence czar" when it was created, the relationship that the DNI has to its members is, as we understand it, more likely coordination than control. 

Launched in 2005, the DNI is a recent and very unusual structure in the formal org chart of the federal government, born as part of the post-9/11 overhaul in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The DNI's position is a dramatic example of the "virtual reorganization" of government, in this case a formal coordinating network set up by legislation and layered on the physical hierarchy-bureaucracy infrastructure.

In the next few days, we'll release "Virtual Reorganization" the third in our series of NetAge Reports, which focuses on the power of reorganization without moving the bureaucratic boxes around.

"Flex your force"

Wonder where this all is going? I just came across "Flex Your Force: Building Your Virtual Office," a very forward-thinking interview with Sun's VP of Open Work Services, Anne Bamesberger. I love that it's from last year, which doubles the forward-thinking quotient here...and that I got to it from an alert set to my name, which linked to a comment I'd made (referencing the green teams theme here) on an HBR Online article on the carbon footprint of work.

Bamesberger has a startling stat: There are approximately 60 million knowledge workers" in the US alone ... well suited to operat[ing]" in "an Open Work environment," meaning they move around, have suitable collaborative spaces to convene in, and are equipped with excellent IT support and HR policies. Bamesberger figures that merely 5 million of them "are supported by a formal strategic program. The remaining 55 million are becoming more distributed on a daily basis, but being unsupported, they have unprotected, sensitive information with them. If they are running around with mobile phones that nobody is supporting or managing, how do you protect the enterprise IP?"

Whatever you call this new style of work, it's an epidemic. Recently, we've been working from a chicken coop on an island that has no bridges, roads, or stores while engaging in conference calls, sending those all-precious documents, scheduling meetings, and generally acting like we're all dressed up and in the office, i.e. we have high-speed internet, allowing us to watch the political conventions and the news on the very same screens where we're typing. This is all entirely different from the way it was even a year ago.

I'm glad to see Sun pushing at this from so many directions. And they have been for years. We profiled Sun Teams in our book, Virtual Teams; Jonathan Schwartz was in the first handful of CEOs to blog (corporately, Sun has skadzillons of blogs) ; they're doing virtual worlds stuff for collaboration; getting good results from telecommuting...and now this very good thinking from Ms. Bamesberger. All organizations need to regard this new way of working as intrinsic to their strategies.

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...at Enterprise 2.0

Coming to Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston in a few weeks? If so, please let me know and please come to our sessions. I'm involved with three, including this one, which I'm sharing with, guess who, Jeff Stamps, and is about, guess what, virtual teams current and future:

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...

Virtual teams have always been in the 2.0 world, adding content to their shared online spaces, carrying on conversations after the lights have gone out, trying out new media. But the explosion of 2.0 technologies - and the advent of a generation that knows more about how to work online than their bosses - has altered (and will continue) to alter the virtual team landscape. What are the simple ideas that can slice through the complexity facing virtual teams? How can they easily form networks? How can they navigate among the multiple organizations that they serve? Hear the latest from the people who coined the term "virtual teams."

Date: 6/12/2008
Time: 10:45 AM
Room: Carlton

Email: friend or foe?

Just spent the past couple of days with a group of dedicated public servants giving a "teamnet" workshop - teamnet* meaning "network of teams" as there were five teams in this session together comprising a major governmental initiative to increase knowledge sharing. I know there are readers thinking "government" and "knowledge sharing" must surely be an oxymoron. But once again, I come away from a few days with government folks revering their commitment to a life that is not glamorous, that doesn't pay much, that is often frustrating, that perforce means working in a system that is unbearably slow but which offers rewards of a different kind. Service. Thanks to all involved.

We talked about email a lot. The complaints are familiar, the sheer volume, the endless cc:'s, the wonton use of attachments...but there was one voice, one strong voice for the power of email as an information sharing vehicle - rather than as a communication device. This fellow has been on listservs for a very long time; people in his network depend on them for conveying truly useful information. I agree. There are good uses for email. We just need good operating agreements that people need to do their best to adhere to.

What about you? Are you tapped out on email, wish it had never come into existence? Has your organization come up with some good guidelines regarding attachments, cc'ing, subject lines, and the like? Has anyone out there tried what Intel has, "Zero email Friday", which I mentioned here once before?

*We coined the word "teamnet" in our 1993 book, The TeamNet Factor (Wiley).

Sitescape goes to Novell

For those who follow the business of the collaboration/communities of practice/virtual teaming business, Novell has acquired Sitescape as per the Feb 13, 2008, press release. And for those with a long memory, Sitescape got its start in the mid-90s and came to wider attention when it acquired AltaVista (now owned by Overture Services), the first truly powerful search engine and my fave for many years, from Compaq, which had acquired it when Compaq swallowed Digital Equipment Corporation, home to the engineers who invented AltaVista.

Jeff Stamps on Teams of Practice

Jeff Stamps has taken the time to reply at length and in depth to Mike Gotta's response to my post on Teams of Practice. Here's Jeff's thinking:

Mike, this is a terrific post on "Teams of Practice". I'll take a crack at it in the knowledge management context in which we coined the term.

At a high level, we see KM in three phases of collaboration. 

Phase 1 is the capturing, storing, and making accessible knowledge objects generated elsewhere in the organization, the Knowledge Base, for shared use.

Phase 2 added Communities of Practice to source knowledge directly from people. CoP systems of conversation follow Etienne Wenger's observation that people pass practices, their "how-tos," along informal pathways of tacit knowledge exchange, propelled along by questions and answers and held together by social relationships of community. Here, the conversation itself is the knowledge base.

Phase 3 adds Teams of Practice to source knowledge directly from teams. We mean to capture both what "a team of practice" is, and how they inevitably connect as "teams of practice," a network of ToPs.

Teams are the working units of the organization, both strategic (executive) and tactical (line) teams at all levels. The team context allows people to collaboratively pursue concrete goals, test ideas, make decisions, develop and execute tasks, and produce output. As teams go online, they create and capture knowledge objects, generate focused conversations, and produce a wealth of contextual "how-tos" in agendas, task lists, time lines, etc. Hence, knowledge captured in the context of an online team room is the actual tacit practice of the organization.

Organizations are inherently networks of teams, starting with the hierarchy, which is a network of interlocked management teams of direct reporting relationships. Today, many more types of teams are added to that basic set of groups to get the work of the organization done. All these teams are producing output used by other teams in the organization in a sequence of upstream-to-downstream and supplier-customer relationships feeding teams delivering to the organization's ultimate customer(s). The horizontal connections among working teams are the ones that produce large-scale organizational results. This network of teams exists whether recognized or not, and is not a stage on the way to a CoP of individuals.

What's historically new to us as a species long familiar with the complexities of small groups, as with the first two phase of KM, is the online part, the externalization of memory and learning in the global cloud of virtual spacetime. As more of a team's daily life occurs in or passes through online places, more concrete practice is captured in its natural, role-based, context. This is increasingly happening whether the team is collocated or not.

However, teams are jumping online in all manner of KM containers, most groups happily isolated from one another. The challenge is to network them in the meaningful pattern of their work, not just randomly (i.e., search across team spaces). Teams of practice would not only share across teams, but enable learning and problem-solving at the teamnet (network of teams) level of producing organizational results.