Endless Knots

Dorothy, it's knowledgement management

The Leavenworth (Kansas and, yes, I wore my red shoes) Times carried Conference focuses on knowledge management last Friday, an article on the event where we spoke in early November:

Speakers included the husband and wife team of Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, co-founders of a company called NetAge.

Part of their presentation focused on virtual teams, which Lipnack said are small groups of people working independently across boundaries.

Stamps and Lipnack provided tips for operating what they called “far-flung teams” or groups with people working at different locations.

Thanks to writer John Richmeier for including us in the piece. You can see our full presentation to the conference by clicking here: The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams.

Teams of practice

We've been hanging out at the collaboration bar for a bit of time now, which means that we've seen a few different customers take stools, saying *theirs* is the only drink to order. They down a few and poof! they're gone.

Some have stuck. For at least a decade and a half, communities of practice have held their seat. Ever since Etienne Wenger (hello, old friend) coined the phrase in his and Jean Lave's 1991 book, Situated Learning, savvy organizations have been promoting their use. Among the first was Bob Buckman, then CEO of Buckman Labs, the specialty chemical company, who turned his entire organization into one gigantic global community of practice years before most reading here even had email accounts. We documented Bob's story in Virtual Teams--and, perhaps more importantly, he documented it himself in Building the Knowledge-Driven Organization.

Not long after people in the collaboration community (which will have to be a subject of another post someday) started to use the term "communities of practice" came its partner-in-crime, knowledge management, whose history Karl-Erik Sveiby, the Swedish writer and consultant, has been tracking for years.

Comes then a whole sector of the tech industry focused on making it easier for people to "manage" their knowledge, a concept that bears reflecting upon elsewhere (is knowledge manageable as, say, people are? - I'll let that one go for now). Also comes then all manner of upstart efforts within organizations to swap learning as fast as possible, often without their employers' imprimaturs.

Among these were two majors in the US Army, Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, who, without sanction or budget or business plan, started Companycommand.com. There soldiers could exchange, well, war stories. A good summary of their experience is documented in the Government Executive article, "Managing Technology Linked in the Fight," which was laid out in detail in the 2005 book, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional, which the two majors along with two others co-authored with Professor Nancy Dixon.

All of which is a windy introduction to the fact that the US Army has a long, rich history in communities of practice with now probably tens of thousands of online forums where soldiers of every rank can exchange information in a timely way.

So it was that the Army held its 3rd Annual Knowledge Management Conference last week, where we, along with Dr. Dixon and others, gave talks, ours titled The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams. Lots of discussion about communities of practice, knowledge sharing, semantic webs, and all the other topics that IT professionals, learning experts, and the top brass, whether those with stars on their shoulders or big paychecks, worry about.

OK. What's next? Jeff and I came away thinking about this: perhaps the era of the community of practice needs to morph a bit. Aren't we now in the time when teams, not just amorphous communities or lone-ranger individuals, need to share practices? And isn't the technology up to the task, what with virtual (or, if you prefer, global) teams exploding everywhere and wikis for teams going up on the web faster than their IT departments can track them? Teams, we think, are the way to work (without diminishing the genius and creativity of the individual), the hope for solving the seemingly intractable problems that sometimes make it hard to get up in the morning.

Thus, we invite a new customer to the collaboration bar: Teams of Practice, the title of this post.

Building trust in virtual teams--a survey from Jordan

Frequent readers know that one of our purposes here is to help students conduct research on virtual teams, collaboration, and networks (and maybe something else if it seems relevant or appealing). One such inquiry came from Ernest Kutuk at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, studying trust in virtual teams. Thus, let me say again: students, feel free to email me with your projects and if they fit these broad criteria, you're in.

Just a few hours ago, we received our first such request from a student at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), on the same topic as the Croatian request.

Mohamad Alsharo is studying for his master's degree in computer science, majoring in project management. As part of this work, he's doing a survey on trust in virtual teams, thus his contacting us. Here's Mohamad's note. I encourage everyone to fill out the survey. And, Mohamad, be sure to report back on your results so I can post those too:

My master's thesis is something new in Jordan. No one here has ever worked on virtual teams so this may open a new scope for our students. In my thesis, I'm trying to come up with a model for building trust among virtual teams members. I've been working on this topic for almost 18 months now and have put my results into a survey that I am distributing to both virtual teams researchers and practitioners to see if they agree or disagree my conclusion.

For this reason I have divided my survey into three parts. The first is for Researchers, the second is for Team Leaders, and the third is for Team Members. I hope you can help me in my research and I'm ready for any questions or suggestions from you.

My survey links are:
Researchers: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/Academic.phtml
Team Leaders: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/leaders.phtml
Team Members: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/members.phtml

Thank you again and I'm looking forward to hearing from you,

Mohamad Alsharo

The art of networks

If there was one persistent image that threaded through the presentations at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems, it was the network. Whether the presenter was a biologist, physicist, mathematician, or some other specialist whose field I couldn't quite comprehend, he or she showed a graph of a network. Even Nicholas Christakis, the internist and social scientist, who presented the latest findings of the famous Framingham Heart Study, had network graphs illustrating where smokers in the study have ended up (on the periphery) and how obesity patterns observed different patterns (linked to norms rather than behaviors).

These are gorgeous images, these networks. Bill Ives, whose presentation on blogs at KM Cluster's Inside Social Networks two years ago was instrumental in my becoming a blogger, points to an astonishing collection of links to network images at Trust Art, including those at visualcomplexity. Serious major wow.

Bill's work on blogs deserves greater mention. I've had the chance to talk to Bill a number of times over the past two years. Each time I do, I learn something else about blogging. In our most recent conversation, he pointed out how important it is to use meaningful words when you link, meaning that it's better to call out Trust Art for its collection of links on "trust metrics" than it is to say that they're here. Why? Because the search engines can't do much with the word here but they will pick up on Trust Art or trust metrics.

Over time, Bill has developed a method for blogging with which he advises businesses. Following his approach, hits, that all-important measure, rise, making for happier bloggers. I admire Bill's work and have benefited greatly from his generous sharing of knowledge. His description of his Business Blog Coaching and Consulting Services is worth clicking through to.

The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams

A bit of self-referential reporting here: Milestone Group has published its quarterly journal, wherein lies our "invited article," The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams. Click and enjoy.

For any writers interested in how something like this comes about, here's the backstory. Shortly after joining Facebook in September of this year, I received a "friend" request from Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of Milestone Group. Turned out that Mark had read The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book, as a result of his having worked at Index Systems, a consulting company where we'd done some work. Once he found me on Facebook, he asked if we'd like to contribute to his journal. Took a look and quickly agreed. This issue, for example, has an interview with our friend Nova Spivack of Radar Networks; an opinion piece by Eric Benhamou, now a venture capitalist and chairman of 3Com, where he was CEO; and an editorial by Milestone's Bill Burk with the intriguing title of Why Nine Men Can't Make a Baby in a Month.

Thanks, Mark, and to Jim Conley, blogger at On Brookline, who edits the journal.

You: Price tag, $300

My fellow bloggers will appreciate this problem: much to blog about, little time to blog. So it is that a compelling presentation by Stew Sutton of The Aerospace Corporation at the Knowledge Leadership Forum week before last has not gotten its due. As I've said before, one of the unnoticed benefits of being a speaker is hearing other speakers (viz. Robin Gerber), as I did at the Brookings Leadership Lab in September. Rarely does one (meaning this one) have the time but because the Knowledge Leadership Forum took place within quick driving distance, it was possible to hang out.

Stew was the person who really introduced me to Second Life, the online virtual world where people create digital versions of themselves (or of the beings they wish they were). I wrote a bit about IBM's guidelines for Second Life a few months back. In truth, I first learned about Second Life only 18 months ago from that serial tracker of new things digital, John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion. Like a couple of million other people, I logged in after talking to Stew. If you're there, you're unlikely to find me teleporting around but should you be curious, search for Pesha Linden. I chose the name Pesha for reasons known to my family and a few close friends; the name Linden was available on a list and I went right for it: my last name, original spelling Lipniak, means "linden tree" (or white wood, depending on whom you ask) in Ukrainian.

Of course, now that I have time to write this post, I can't find my notes from Stew's great presentation. He showed us all the cool things that his company, possibly the very first company to use Second Life, to support collaboration. Freed from the physics of our little planet, things fly and float and pulse and disappear in the Aerospace collaboratorium (they don't call it that but it deserves such a grand term). Astrophysicists can stand in the spray of rockets; they can invent new ways for rockets to spray. Very, very cool and apologies to Stew for the poor reportage (my early editors would be upset with me).

Here's the one fact I remember: you can have an avatar, meaning a digital version of yourself, made these days for $300. I mean something that looks like you. $300. Three bills for the virtual you.

Bloggers, listen up: think F

Maybe all you bloggers reading here already know this. I did not until Jim Conley, who keeps the well-read On Brookline blog, came to visit today. Though he visited for different purposes, it wasn't long until we lept off to my beloved topic of writing (and blogging). Jim teaches writing to prospective communicators at Emerson College and thus has an opinion or two about what works online.

Turns out, bloggerinos, that people read screens in what researcher Jakob Nielsen dubbed an F-pattern.

We skim the top lines relatively quickly, moving across the screen (left to right*).

Then work our way down the screen.

Reading a bit here.

And there.

So

if

you

want

people

to read...

Enough of that. Get the point? How did people discover this? Heat tracking studies of eye movements. Ironically, or coincidentally, or neither, we happened to have a tour of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (yes, as in Fidelity Investments) last week, where we looked into one lab where they were tracking subjects' eye movements. Wish I'd known then what I know now. Henceforth, dear readers, watch for my posts to be very F-y.

*Is it a mirror F for the right to left languages? Jakob, where are you?

For a more detailed description of what he found, jump:

Mass Technology Leadership Council winners!

Not sure how this one slipped past (award ceremony was last week) but our esteemed friend David Weinberger was just named co-winner of "Mover and Shaker of the Year" Award by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. MTLC, presided over by yet another terrific person, Joyce Plotkin, is the New England technology industry group that's been introducing new ideas in our region for a long, long time. Signature events in recent memory: Mikhail Gorbachev addressing some 750 people about the role of information technology in Russia and Eastern Europe (see Dan Bricklin's blog post here); Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales bringing us up-to-date on all things wiki; and our very own Jeff Stamps appearing at the Tech Trends meeting in September, '07.

Another MTLC winner worth noting: CIO of the Year, Dr. John Halamka, who plays that role nobly for the huge health-care network that is the CareGroup (along with that little institution known as Harvard Medical School) and who's just started a new blog here.

Shhhh...it's Tuesday morning

Ever wish you could have a day with no interruptions? Or even an hour? Intel has been running an experiment whereby Tuesday mornings are Quiet Time. So far, so good. People love it, according to Nathan Zeldes:

Many of the engineers are happy about the newfound thinking time, and are protecting it by pushing back on interrupters during the Tuesday AM slot. Not unexpectedly there are also some who complain that this isolation prevents them from getting answers to urgent questions during that morning… we are assuming the benefit outweighs this cost, and are waiting for the mid- and post-survey to tell us whether this is correct.

Next up for the engineers, Zero Email Friday, a bit of hyperbole it make the point:

In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group...While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice.

Imagine the possibilities if we actually starting talking to one another again. Hello.

Mr. Gore, virtual teamer (and Nobelist)

Most know Al Gore these days as the environmental protector (and possibly the world's best Powerpoint presenter). Others know him, as he says in one of the greatest opening lines of any speaker, the man "who used to be the next president of the United States."

We "know" him (note quotes) as the designer of one of the best virtual teaming projects we've ever worked on.

In 1993, then Vice President Gore was leading the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (originally called the National Performance Review), the 500th study of how to streamline, shrink, and simplify the mammoth beast that is the US government. Gore's design was unique: instead of hiring consultants, he recruited volunteers from within the agencies and departments. They, in turn, staffed cross-functional teams that studied each government entity. If you were from the Justice Department, you might serve on the Dept of Agriculture team, along with people from what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Dept of Energy, and so on.

These volunteers were good, very good. They in turn recruited every and anyone with a new idea about organizations, business, and communication, i.e. every legitimate book writer they could lay their hands on. Tom Peters kicked off the five-month effort in Mellon Auditorium and for every Wednesday following, anyone with a book vaguely related to organizational life was invited to a brown-bag lunch.

We got our call just as our book, The TeamNet Factor: Bringing the Power of Boundary Crossing into the Heart of Your Business, was in production. Marion Metcalf, a staffer at INS and a key member of the Reinventing Government staff, read the galleys of the book, called, and said that boundary crossing was key to their work--and to their sustaining the energy behind the project. We've told the detailed story of what happened next here in our following book, The Age of the Network. The cross-boundary design of the project which encouraged, indeed required, people to team up outside their agencies' walls proved a powerful engine. For years following, NetResults, the network that we helped launch as the project came to a close in the same auditorium where Tom Peters keynoted the project's beginning, maintained connections among NPRG staffers, some of whom we're still in communication with today.

During our days working on this project, we heard only praise for Al Gore, adjectives like hard working, smart, insightful, visionary.

Highest salutes today to you, Al Gore.