From the lack of posts here, it may seem that I’ve been slack. In fact I’ve been busy with paid work and the public outings that I have done haven’t necessarily involved presentations & notes. I thought I’d just note what these were:
I ran a session at Oz-IA 2009 using the Straits Knowledge Methods & Culture cards & also Arthur Shelley’s Organisational Zoo cards too. I enjoyed it – although the World Cafe card generated much angst (nay, derision) from the information architects assmbled.
I was called in at late notice to run a session at the Ark Group’s Collective Intelligence event. I ran a reverse brainstorm: How can we ensure that our organisations do not use the collective intelligence present in them?
I was a stooge collaborator with both Patrick Lambe & Cory Banks for their respective sessions at KM Australia 2009.
I did some facilitation-y stuff with the joint NSW KM Forum / Sydney Sharepoint User group love-in. More here.
I’ve not done a lot of presentations recently. I’ve preferred to do something a little more “interactive”. So when the call for papers came out for actKM 2009, the last thing I wanted to do was a paper. Instead I was interested in exploring the edges of knowledge management. I wasn’t really sure how to do that but I had something in the back of my mind from the Mindell’s process work. This can involve exploring psychological “edges” using physical movement and other techniques. So I dipped my toe in the water and sent out a question to the actKM email list concerning disciplinary boundaries. The response I got back wasn’t particularly helpful and this indicated that I couldn’t do anything too confronting.
Then the thought struck me. Get the participants to draw maps. So that’s what I did. Six tables, six maps. In each case I asked them to map out knowledge management as an imaginary nation and then identify who else this nation might interact with (through trade, war or something else).
Some comments:
“Finance” crops up as an ambiguous/hostile power is a couple of maps – and as the “Resource Shark” in another.
Some of the maps are a little idealistic – how things should be rather than how they are.
One of the maps positions KM’s neighbours as process-based – e.g. six sigma, BPM, Lean, TQM.
One group had the occasional KM guru on the map – but up a mountain separate from practitioners.
Technology is often mentioned but rarely given centre-stage.
One group started identifying KM’s neighbours (e.g. Project Management, Organisational Development) without any prompting but others took a more KM-centric perspective.
I’d welcome your feedback as well – which you can send as an email or write as a comment to this post. There’s even a wiki version of the paper on wikispaces – which people can do with what they like but I take no responsibility for.
[Update: As David Gurteen has requested, a creative commons license has been appended to the document]
Download Virtually Indispensable – which the nice folks at hrmonthly have published in their latest edition. I think it may be better summed up with its original title – “Networkplace”.
