February 12, 2025 • 44 mins
The show you are about to experience serves twofold. First and foremost, this conversation design elicits knowledge from an experienced individual or expert. It is modeled on conversational theory and utilizes a protagonist, me, to crack into deeper knowledge by a vigorous discussion. Pioneer Knowledge Services has become adept in this practice and offers it as a service. Think of all those super smart people retiring. It is the best way to secure and transfer knowledge.
The other piece of what this show provides is a self-help guide leading a community group. It will aid anyone as an example to leading communities.
Stan Garfield, a true leader in the field of knowledge management, has been a friend to Pioneer Knowledge Services® for many years. Find him on LinkedIn and learn more about the Systems Integration and Knowledge Management (SIKM) Leaders Community.
Stan Garfield is a knowledge management author, speaker, and community leader based in Northville, Michigan. This is his 30th year in the field of knowledge management..
Stan spent 8 years at Deloitte leading communities and enterprise social networking. Prior to that, he spent 25 years at HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Stan launched Digital's first knowledge management program in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq, and led the Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Program for HP. He also worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, St. Louis University School of Medicine, and Washington University School of Medicine. Stan holds a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.
He leads the SIKM Leaders Community, February 2025, it has 1,264 members globally.
The community’s main activities are
Online threaded discussions – discussions on the field of knowledge management, questions and answers, and links to job postings
Monthly calls – presentations by members and invited speakers
Stan is invited to present at numerous conferences, including KMWorld and the APQC KM Conference. He has published over 1,000 articles on leadership, innovation, knowledge management, communities of practice, enterprise social networks, and social media. He is the author of the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring knowledge management thought leaders.
Books
Implementing a Successful KM Program (2007)
Successful Knowledge Leadership: Principles and Practice (2013), Chapter 5: The Modern Knowledge Leader: A Results-Oriented Approach
Gaining Buy-in for KM (2014), Chapter 2: Obtaining support for KM: The ten commitments
Measuring the ROI of Knowledge Management (2016), 2nd Edition, Chapter 7: The case against ROI for knowledge management
Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program (2017)
Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners (2018), Chapter 6: Communities Manifesto
Handbook of Community Management: A Guide to Leading Communities of Practice (2020)
The Five Cs of KM (2022)
Knowledge Nuggets: 100 KM Infographics (2023)
Profiles in Knowledge: 120 Thought Leaders in Knowledge Management (2024)
Content
Knowledge Management Site: http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stangarfield/
Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/stangarfield
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There is an old adage, one that you
might have heard from a grandparent or village
wise person. The one that says, you get
out what you put in, meaning your efforts
are matched to some degree by the results
or the output.
Now take our nonprofit, Pioneer Knowledge Services, who
delivers this cool program that you're listening to
(00:21):
right now, takes a bunch of effort that
you don't even see. We hope that you
obtain value from our efforts to deliver it
to your powers of reason. Here is where
you come in. You. Yeah. The listeners.
Make our efforts rewarded.
Consider donating to keep us moving forward. Visit
pioneer-ks.org
(00:42):
and click on donate.
The show you're about to experience serves twofold.
First and foremost, this conversation
design elicits knowledge from an experienced individual or
expert.
It is modeled on conversational theory and utilizes
a protagonist,
that's me,
to crack in a deeper knowledge by vigorous
(01:04):
discussion.
Pioneer knowledge services has become adept in this
practice and offers it as a service. Think
of all those super smart people retiring.
Oh, scary.
It is the best way to secure and
transfer knowledge. The other piece of what this
show provides
is a self help guide in leading a
(01:24):
community group. It will aid anyone, as an
example, to lead communities.
Stan Garfield is a true leader in the
field of knowledge management
and has been a friend to Pioneer Knowledge
Services for many years.
Find him on LinkedIn and learn more about
the systems integration and knowledge management leaders community.
(01:50):
Stan Garfield, we have been here before.
Today is a very interesting thing that we're
gonna talk about.
Where are you on the planet, and what's
the latest thing you've been doing? So I
am in Northville, Michigan, which is a suburb
of Detroit. It's about twenty minutes from Ann
Arbor, about thirty minutes from Downtown Detroit. And
what I've been doing today is writing a
(02:11):
little bit about how to cope with all
the things going on in the world today
and trying to help my friends and family
feel at ease with unpleasant developments.
I hear what you're saying. Please send me
a copy. I I could use all the
help I could get. Get. I'll be glad
to. Thank you. Have you ever lived overseas?
I've never lived overseas. I've been in this
area of the country. Well, I've been a
Midwestern
(02:31):
son of the Midwest for most of my
life with an exception of six years spent
in New Jersey. But born in Illinois, lived
in a couple of cities in Illinois, lived
in Omaha, Nebraska,
Saint Louis, Missouri a couple times, and moved
to Michigan
in 1986.
So this is the longest that I've lived
anywhere in my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
What was the introduction to knowledge management that
(02:54):
turned your eye and head to this whole
field? It's something that I probably was always
doing most of my life, which certainly didn't
have a name for it. But even as
a kid, I like to go up to
the blackboard in the classroom and write
little interesting facts or news items to share
with my classmates.
I like to write little newspapers and write
plays and pass things around in school. And
(03:15):
then when I first discovered radio, that was
something that really appealed to me. My friend
and I started a radio station together in
New Jersey back when we were in high
school. Nice. I continued doing that when I
moved to Saint Louis. I did it when
I was at school up in Northwestern.
So, the idea of communicating and being a
journalist always appealed to me. Yeah. And I
thought I was gonna study journalism and become
(03:37):
a journalist, but I got instead turned on
to computer science my freshman year. And I
switched from journalism to computer science and I
graduated from Washington University with degree in computer
science. But I still had that journalist mindset.
So I think combining the two, so it's
been a good thing for being in the
field of knowledge management. So when it finally
came around to where I was spending a
(03:57):
lot of my time sharing information with my
coworkers at digital,
people recognize that. And when it's time to
start a Kilometers program in 1996,
they turned to me and asked me to
to be the one to start it. So
I've been doing it since then, which is
now twenty eight years ago. So you you
took me back to grade school, I presume,
with the
being the person that delivers the news, so
(04:18):
to speak, to be the informer, to be
the transformer of other people by giving them
information and data.
Who in your family
set that experience for you that you thought,
or is it just genetic? Well, I don't
know exactly. I when I write about my
parents, my father was a scholar,
a professor of psychology.
He wrote
(04:39):
number of books. So I think my book
writing, in part, I owe to him. Yeah.
Mom was a a reading specialist and imbued
in me this love of reading, which I've
always had. Mhmm. And she also, interestingly enough,
when she was a student at Antioch College,
she had the title of community manager
Oh, really? Way back in time. But Wow.
So the fact that my parents had that
(05:00):
in their background of reading and writing and
whatever community management meant at that time probably
had some influence on me along the way.
Do you have any example that is a
memory of, like, there was an awareness in
you that, like, you saw something, you experienced
something, you went through something, and you're like,
oh, I'm good at this.
(05:20):
This is what I'm good at. Well, I
think when I started to write,
especially, I remember writing, things that I would
circulate at school when I was in high
school in New Jersey. And people would read
it, and then they'd give me back positive
feedback like this is funny or I, you
know, I'm enjoying this. And like a newsletter?
What do you what do you mean? You
didn't write I actually wrote satirical plays about
(05:40):
the things that went on at school. And
I think it was a way of getting
some of my feelings and frustrations out. You
know, if I didn't care for how the
teachers were teaching, I could satirize that in
this
comic play that I've done.
So so I think getting feedback from that
helped me. People said, I don't wanna read
this.
But they said, yeah. They they wanted it.
And so people would keep asking, let me
(06:02):
see it. Let me see it. And when
I went on the air and started broadcasting,
I got good feedback on that too. And
people like listening to me, especially I did
play by play of the basketball team's games
and and got a lot of praise for
that. I remember being at one game when
I was a senior doing the broadcast of
the game and one of the cheerleaders came
up and had headphones on next to me,
(06:23):
was listening to my broadcast and she told
me, oh, you're really good. You know? So
if you hear that,
that'll encourage you. Yeah. It's an element of
conversation
that has such an interesting richness to it
that there's no other way you could get
to some of the data other than a
conversation. So thank you for and not that
broadcasting is a conversation, but it's still this
(06:44):
You are challenging yourself to communicate well. Yes.
Alright. So let's step into the topic today.
Back in 02/2005,
you created an organization. Can you give me
a little data about what it is and
what it was for? In 02/2005,
I attended the APQC knowledge management conference for
the first time. It was actually held in
(07:06):
Saint Louis that year. It was mostly held
in Houston thereafter, but it was held in
Saint Louis, which is my old hometown. And
I was a presenter there. I think that's
the first time that I was accepted to
present at a Kilometers conference, so that was
a big deal. And as a presenter, I
was asked if I would be willing to
host a birds of a feather lunch session.
And the idea behind this was there'd be
a big round table. I'd put up a
(07:28):
sign with a with a subject on it,
and people who were interested in that subject
would be encouraged to sit down at the
table, and we'd get a quorum of people
and have a conversation over lunch. So what
I put up on the sign was consulting
and systems integration because that was the industry
that I was in. And people filled up
the table. We had a good conversation over
lunch. And at the end of that conversation,
(07:49):
I asked everyone at the table, would you
like to continue this conversation? And they all
said yes. And I said, let me get
your business cards. And I created the community.
I didn't have a name for the community
at the time, but the sign that said
consulting and systems integration.
And so actually, it's my friend Raj Dada
created a Yahoo group for the community, and
he called it SIKM, which stood for systems
(08:12):
integration knowledge management because that was the original
industry focus. I began to solicit people when
I got back from the conference to join
the community, and I later realized that limiting
it to a specific industry didn't make sense.
It was of interest to anyone working in
the field. When the community got created with
that set of letters, s I k m,
it really didn't apply. It was really just
(08:32):
a global knowledge management community, but that term
has stuck with us since then. And it's
kind of funny because people will misread it
and and call it skim or they'll pronounce
it Sikkim.
Or if I say it quickly, when I
say s I k m, they won't necessarily
hear what I'm saying. In any case, it's
just like AQQC used to mean American productivity
and quality center, but they don't use that
(08:53):
anymore. Same thing with SiCam. It doesn't mean
anything. It's just a term that we've had
for the past nineteen years and people recognize.
So who came up with your logo? The
logo came from one of my team members
at HP, Marcus Funka.
I think he created it to use as
a logo for our cam community when we
were all at Hewlett Packard together many years
(09:14):
ago. So I use that Mhmm. As the
logo for SI Cam. For the listener, what
it is is it looks like a bunch
of stick people in a circle with their
heads in the center of the circle, meaning
we're bringing our heads together. That would be
my interpretation.
It's just a great graphic, so I wanted
to hear about that. Well, the interesting thing
is is folks, we got together. Stan and
(09:36):
I had a chat here a couple weeks
ago, and we talked about
transfer of knowledge, making sure succession planning is
all set, and all the parts and pieces
of what that all means.
And through our conversation, we were like,
oh, you don't really have anything for everything
you know and everything you've created with the
SIKM.
(09:57):
Maybe it's time to build a product. And
then from that conversation, it was like, why
don't we just do a podcast about that
product and talk about the
process? Because it is a useful tool to
get into a behavior and a practice for
anyone
to be able to have a handoff packet
to whoever's standing around, whoever's next
(10:18):
if you're not there. It's a historical marker.
It is a data process
collector. It it's a little bit of everything.
Can you give me what you would define
this product you created? It's about folks, it's
about four pages in a Word doc. Yeah.
The origin of this stems from discussion
we had during our presentation that I was
(10:38):
generally giving with Dinesh Gerbi and Patrick Lam
at the Now It's Summit Dublin Conference. And
during that session, which was on mentoring, Patrick
raised the question of, you know, SiCam is
strongly identified with me as the leader. Some
people think of it as my community.
It's not my community, but I've been the
creator and the leader of it. But the
question was, what's next? What's the succession plan?
(11:00):
If I suddenly disappear, what would happen to
it? Would it disappear also? I don't want
it to disappear. I'd like it to continue
on. So with that in mind, I raised
the subject of, you know, who's going to
be the person who I can hand the
reins to. And then in the discussion that
we had, it became clear that I should
probably try to document what I do. Typically,
people like me will say, well, it does
not that much. I don't spend that much
(11:21):
time. It's pretty easy. I can tell you
I can tell you in a few sentences,
and it's kind of intuitive. But it's really
more than that. So what I did was
I took from, you know, many different articles
that I had written in the past about
this and distilled them into a document. I
added some things that were missing. I went
through a second rev. And today, when looking
at it, I realized I have to add
some more things. So it's probably gonna keep
(11:42):
evolving.
But it's pretty close, I think Yeah. To
containing most of the concepts
of what I do as a community leader
so that other people could take that up
and carry it on. So what what what
do you think is missing? And, folks, we're
just talking, like, to me, it's the who,
what, where, when, how, why kinda collection,
going back to your journalism mentality. It is
trying to get all the parts of the
(12:04):
puzzle on one spot to at least be
a start point for somebody else. Yeah. So
today,
I was actually looking at some posts that
were made today in the SI CAM leaders
online discussion,
and one of them was about knowledge retention.
So this typically comes up a lot in
the community. People will raise a question that
we've actually discussed before, and they may or
may not be aware of that. And there's
(12:24):
nothing wrong with that. You know, it used
to be there was a culture aspect of
early communities that if you were to ask
a question that had already been asked, you'd
get slapped on the wrist because you didn't
search first. But I never believed in that.
I don't wanna discourage anybody for asking a
question. But what I wanna do is I
wanna point them back to where we discussed
before so they're not starting from scratch. So
today, as I was doing that, what I
do is I go in and I I
(12:45):
respond to the person. The person who posted
it had already gotten several good responses, but
I responded with two links. One was to
a specific thread that we had had on
this topic of offboarding, which is what the
post was about. And secondly, to the hashtag
now is retention, which goes to all of
the threads we've had over the years on
this subject. So that the original person could
see, well, here's a thread that's very specific
(13:07):
to what you've asked about. And then here
are all the other ones that may be
valuable to you as well. Now I realized
in doing that that I hadn't included that
aspect of
monitoring and then making sure that you point
people back to their previous thread. So that's
something that that I will have. You're serving
as a curator and a leader of a
community
and a, I hate to say the word,
(13:28):
agitator, but you keep things
moving. Right? There's a point where you can't
just sit and watch everything just happen. You
have to be a participant
and give people shortcuts and and help them.
That's what your intent is. Right. So one
of the things that I think is very
important for any community leader is to monitor
the discussions, be aware of each thing that's
being posted. Mhmm. Or you have to be
(13:50):
on top of that. Then in many cases,
you really don't have to do anything further.
If the community's responding
and the person who started discussion is getting
value from the responses,
good. Sometimes I may have something to add.
I usually don't wanna be the first voice
to respond. I don't want it to make
it feel like I'm a know it all
and other people are discouraged from giving their
(14:11):
answers. So I will wait for other people
to respond. And after a while, if I
have something to add, then I will. Sometimes
I don't have anything to add and I'll
just stay out of it. But the times
that I really jump in are times where
in the case of today where the threat's
not the first one and I wanna make
sure they realize we've discussed that before and
take advantage of it. And the other case
is where there's no responses. So that's the
(14:32):
thing you really guard against after a few
days if somebody's asked a question and no
one's answered it, then it's my duty to
make sure that something happens. Now there's several
things that I can do. Mhmm. I can
answer it myself.
I can respond and say, hey, can anyone
else in the community answer as prompt? As
a prompt. Yeah. Nudge them into doing it.
Yeah. Yeah. And that often works. And there's
other times where I might go offline, send
(14:54):
a private message to someone who I think
can answer this and see if they'll either
go into the community and answer it there.
Or if not, send me an answer that
I can post in reply. So those are
the kinds of things that I can do
to make sure that they do get a
response, and so they're not just sitting there
frustrated by the lack of an answer. So
what you just explained to me, is that
covered in this document?
Yes. It's, it's covered in the document, but
(15:16):
it's also the part that I was gonna
add. So the idea of monitoring the discussions,
making sure the answers get provided. But I'm
gonna add things specifically about now interestingly enough,
I've written about all these things. I've written
a book on community management. So it's all
in there. Just haven't pulled out that part,
made it specific to this document yet. One
point in here that I kinda caught my
eye that you
(15:36):
keep an eye on hashtags.
And if you only find one hashtag,
it seems to be a a point to
to pull it out of there. Is that
right? The hashtags in the community are something
that I curate. And probably most hashtags that
we need have have already been created. There's
always a chance that we could need some
new ones and not ruling that out. But
(15:57):
what sometimes happens is some I would describe
it as some people get hashtag happy. Yes.
And they'll post lots and lots of hashtags.
And in social media, that's almost a way
of communicating and expressing. But in in knowledge
management, not so much. Right? It should be
a different function, which is to tie together
all the related threads. But if you introduce
a new hashtag, which is a variant of
(16:19):
one we already have, that actually works against
the purpose. Yeah. Because instead of pulling them
together, you now have redundant hashtags. So as
a hashtag curator,
I'll make sure two things. Number one, and
this is the most common scenario, people post
with no hashtag. That's the most common. In
which case, I will add one to their
thread. Alright. I'll just make sure that it's
tagged so it can be found with other
(16:40):
related threads. And the other case is they
add hashtags which we didn't have and then
I'll look at it and see is that
one we should be adding? If so, fine.
If not, can I use a different one
that we've already used? Alright. So that's kind
of what I'm doing. But if they create
sort of a one off hashtag that I
doubt will ever be used again, that's the
case you're asking about. Then in that case,
I'll remove that hashtag Yeah. Because I don't
(17:00):
think it's helping or adding value. But it's
a subjective thing. But mostly, we have enough
hashtags already. So, like, today, when they talk
about knowledge retention, we have that hashtag. Right?
So what I wanna make sure, they don't
create a new hashtag slightly different Yeah. Or
or misspelled.
Right? Or misspelled. Right. Yeah.
So let's talk about hashtags because I find
them very peculiar because it seems to me
(17:24):
wild guess here. Maybe 70% of the population
does not ever use them. Would that I
mean, do you see that as kind of
a where would you guess the majority of
the folks are? Are they using them or
they're not using? I think your 70% is
probably pretty good. And so the 70% that
don't, I add a hashtag. And by the
way, I don't have any problem with that.
It sounds like I would go on the
warpath and say you must add as no.
(17:46):
I'll add it. And that way, I can
ensure they don't add a misspelled one. Right?
So it's probably a net positive. The flip
side, the other 30% include we even had
several instances where there's no subject at all
in the post, just a string of hashtags.
Well, that's not good. It doesn't really explain
what this post is about using, you know,
the normal sentence structure.
So in that case, I'll add a subject
(18:07):
that tries to explain it to the community
and then maybe reduce the number of hashtags
down to the ones that are essential. What
has changed?
Let's talk about from 02/2005,
it looks like the big muscle movements of
this organization
are the listserv or the forum
and monthly calls and something new that has
(18:27):
been added recently. Something new that's been added
is? The mentoring piece? So the mentoring program
was created last year Mhmm. And Ninez Derby
took the lead on that in conjunction with
Patrick Lamb. And I participated in the initial
version, and it's done in conjunction with another
community, k m four dev. Between the two
communities,
Nines has solicited both volunteers to be mentors
(18:49):
and to be mentees.
So I believe it's a good program. We've
actually added a subgroup in our online community
for that specific program so that the mentees
have their own communication channel. But for general
sharing, I discourage that. I don't want them,
you know, asking questions there that could have
been asked to a larger community. But if
they need to communicate just about the mentoring
program, that's appropriate. So that program exists as
(19:11):
a sub program underneath SI CAM, but normally
it's promoted within the SiCam community and within
cam four dev. So that's an example of
a program which we've added. As you mentioned,
the online discussions, that's the number one thing
that we do. And the number two thing
is our monthly calls. We've had a monthly
call every month since we started, so I'm
proud of that. It's an hour long. It's
(19:31):
always on the same day of the month
with occasional exceptions. Okay. But normally, it's the
third Tuesday of the month. It's at 11AM
eastern time, which allows there to be West
Coast participation in The US. It allows there
to be afternoon participation in Europe. It's not
ideal for Asia. So every once in a
while, when we have a speaker from Australia,
then we'll have a call at a different
time to accommodate that. Would you term all
(19:52):
this activity in the common phrase as a
community of practice? Yes. I would say it's
a community of practice. The people in it
are practicing knowledge management, and they're brought together
for their common passion for that subject.
We have people who are long term veterans
who use it as a way of helping
others. We have lots and lots of newcomers
to the field who are using it to
(20:13):
learn, and we have a lot of people
in between
that both learn and contribute. Where do you
see it going in twenty years? I would
imagine
that it'll keep on as it has. You
know, it's been going almost for twenty years,
so I have no reason to believe that
that won't continue.
People have often proposed that knowledge management is
dead or dying. I don't agree with that.
Yeah. I think it's always gonna be needed.
(20:35):
So if it's always gonna be needed, why
is it gonna be dead? It's it goes
through cycles. Yeah. Right? In every company I've
been at, there's a cycle of enthusiasm and
and then abandonment, but it always comes back
because the need never goes away. It never
goes away because we're talking about people and
behaviors. Right.
Let's go back to community of practice. Can
you explain to people what the
(20:56):
you and I know, but I want the
listener to get a fuller understanding of why
anybody, any organization
would consider creating a community of practice. The
reason that communities exist is that organizations typically
have boundaries within them. They have organizational
silos based on org charts and structures,
and those often are resistant to communication across
(21:18):
those boundaries.
Fundamental purpose of a community is to cut
across those boundaries and to allow everyone in
an organization, regardless of which structure they're under,
to come together
in their shared interests so they can learn
together. So if you're in a very
structured environment where you only report under this
vertical structure, you never communicate with anyone in
a different structure. Community is designed to try
(21:39):
to cut across those so that people who
have the same interest but would otherwise never
know one another, never interact, never work together,
can become aware of each other through the
community. And the beauty of it is if
you get everyone in an organization who shares
the same interests in the community, then you
can guarantee
that there's a way for information and knowledge
to flow across those boundaries. We call that
(22:01):
boundary spanning and that's really one of the
fundamental roles of it. But above that, it's
people volunteering to join. They're not Yeah. Forced
to join. In fact, if you're forced to
join a community, that doesn't work. But if
you join voluntarily
and you put forth the energy at least
to pay attention to what the community is
discussing, then you get something out of it.
You learn, you have resources you can count
(22:21):
on, you have problems to solve, you have
people to help you solve them. And it's
often people that you don't know. Typically, people
will start with people they notice of a
problem. And if I turn to the person
sitting next to me and they don't have
the answer, I can throw up my hands.
But in the community, I can go to
the community and pose that problem. And someone
somewhere in the world that I may never
have heard of before will come back with
an answer, and that's the power of community.
(22:43):
The interesting thing is that I think most
people have a misconception
that if an organization, a company, a firm
wants to create a community practice, that it
has to be work related. Well, one of
the distinctions you can use is that you
can call the other thing a community of
interest.
A community of practice typically revolves around work
related topics, things that we're practicing because they're
(23:04):
part of our work. A community of interest
is something that may not be work related,
but that we still share a passion for.
I've always advocated that the that should both
be supported by any organization, both types. Mhmm.
Even things that are not at all work
related. Yeah. Why should you do that? Why
wouldn't that be wasting time at work and
wasting resources? Well, the answer is, if you
(23:25):
get people active in communities of interest, let's
say you have a runner's community, then they
get used to using communities for that. And
then when you ask them to use them
for work related topics,
they're already accustomed to it, and they can
use the tools, so it transfers very nicely.
So if you encourage both communities of interest
and communities of practice side by side,
the benefit is that people will fundamentally be
(23:47):
comfortable with using communities for both purposes. I
like the side by side because you're you're
dealing with people and then organizational
structures and purpose
in the same stroke of the brush,
and it would be a great rollout to
have them in tandem.
In in my aspect of the community of
interest,
it adds so much value
(24:09):
of connection, of community building, of understanding
other parts,
just all those things
that are really incidental to the organization. It's
not like the organization wants this to happen
because x is gonna be a product.
It enriches
the work culture because people
have to have some trust in order to
(24:30):
communicate
in an authentic
way. And these types of activities build that
practice. That's right. By building that trust and
trusting in the idea of community and and
the idea of connecting with your fellow peers
across your organization, you share an interest. That's
very similar then to what how community of
practice works. So you'll feel that you can
(24:51):
trust that as well. So I think the
other thing is if someone's used to leading
a community of interest, then that skill transfers
nicely. So if they lead a community of
practice, they already kinda know what to do
and that's useful. And then the other thing
is it's probably good for the company. Right?
The company who has communities of interest probably
helps retain employees because they feel good. But
(25:11):
my interest is actually there's an outlet for
it here. I could meet other runners or
other music lovers or other photographers.
These are my hobbies, but the community that
exists is being supported by the company I
work for. That's a good thing.
I enjoy that, and I'll stay here. What
would be your top three things to nurture
a young organization or old that is listening
(25:32):
and saying, boy, we really should try that.
What would be the three things they'd really
need to look at? Well, as communities grow,
this gets to be more and more of
a need. When you're a small fledgling company
and you can all sit in one room,
that's you probably can be aware of what
everybody else is doing. And if you have
to ask something, you just turn across the
room. That's a case where a community doesn't
have to be that formal. But as soon
(25:53):
as you get bigger than that, which most
companies aspire to, and they have different offices
and and they keep growing,
then it becomes more and more necessary. And
when it gets to be a giant global
corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees, it's
almost guaranteed
that you won't know what the rest of
the organization knows. You won't know what they've
done. You won't know the people. You won't
be able to take advantage of what they've
(26:14):
already done. And communities allow you to do
that because it tends to break down the
giant organization into the subcomponents
of the things that are important. So what
I think you want, you wanna have one
community.
By the way, you wanna have exactly one,
not more than one, but one community
for each important topic to the organization.
If you have more than one, you have
the problem of redundancy where you don't know
(26:36):
what community to join and you splinter the
knowledge into different silos. But if you have
one community,
that's desirable. And they wanna have one for
each important topic. You don't wanna be missing
one. Right? So if I'm a project manager,
I want there to be a project management
community. And if I'm an engineer, I want
there to be an engineer community. Right? But
you figure this out. You know what's important?
Maybe Yeah. Depending on the size of your
(26:57):
company, that could be 10 topics. It could
be 30. It's gonna vary. But however many
there are, if you create a community for
each one and you encourage all of your
employees to join the one that's most relevant
to their work, then you can get this,
what I call the the promise that you
can make to them is, if you need
anything or if you have a problem to
solve or you have a question to ask
(27:17):
or you have a resource you're looking for,
go to the community for that topic. Mhmm.
Pose your need there, and you will get
what you need. And that's a pretty powerful
promise to be able to make. Organizationally,
how would you suggest these folks that are
gonna start this for the first time,
how do they get provability
on return of investment,
a measurement? What what do you measure that
(27:39):
makes any difference to the c suite of
why are we doing this? Well, in general,
that question of ROI for all of knowledge
management is a little bit of a red
herring because you can't really prove anything like
that because there's too many variables. What I
say is communities lend themselves
to being able to answer the question, what's
the value of the community?
Because the value is demonstrated by the daily
(28:00):
activities in the community.
So each time someone
posts a question and gets an answer and
then they respond back by saying, thanks. That
was really helpful. That's proof of the value
of the community. And you can collect all
those instances
and then show anyone who is a skeptic
and say, you're wondering about a community. Let
me show you these, you know, 100 examples
of our actual employees getting actual help and
(28:22):
thanking the the person who helped them. By
the way, can you do that for any
other investment? You can't prove it as readily
as you can with the community. So to
me, you can answer the question. You just
can't do a a numerical computation. Right? It's
I mean, you you you can get numeric
in the the number of memberships or the
number of posts or the number of responses,
those types of things. But do they really
(28:43):
mean a whole lot? Because, again, we're getting
to the the value of transfer of whatever
that data was or information
that may have changed somebody's
decision metric or
execution of trying to do something or or
or. I love the opportunity when I tell
people that looking for a way to figure
out how to do something.
(29:05):
I bought a new John Deere tractor.
It had a front end snowblower.
I look at the manual,
and I'm like, oh my good gosh. I
am gonna go berserk trying to figure out
these stupid images.
I just searched,
and there was a YouTube video. So let
me let me I just wanna tell this
because as a knowledge person and somebody that's,
(29:25):
you know, worked around the field of developing
knowledge products, training products for the military, all
those sorts of things, you try to get
to whatever is the easiest way to to
get it to the person.
I found a video of a dude
that didn't say anything.
There was no audio. There was no text.
There was it just was a recording
of him
(29:46):
going through the steps
of putting this this thing on, and it
was enough. It was about a five minute
video. Play it, and then I'd okay. I
do that. And it becomes a mimicking
there's there's not any barrier. I can just
visually see it and then do it. And
I think a lot of people over complicate
items like the product you just created,
(30:07):
which is the essence of what the role
is you do for s I k m.
How do you keep it simple? What's your
advice of just keep it simple?
Well, I think keeping it simple is real
important. I just wanna piggyback on your example
there. In general, whenever I ever have to
find out the answer about how to solve
a problem, what I found over many years
(30:28):
is it's much more likely that I'll find
it by doing a search over the Internet,
and I'll probably find some equivalent of a
community. Right? An online forum, a bulletin board,
a Reddit, whatever I'm gonna find where it's
been solved and I get my helpful answer.
It's much more likely that I'll find it
there than I will in the company's
online support
database. Right? So I think that's another proof
(30:50):
of community over, as you're saying, the manual.
So I can go to their support forum
and I can look for it and I'll
search and I won't find it. Some discussion
forum that answered that question. Right? So That's
another proof of the value of communities. And
the good news is those are online and
we can search for them and find them.
That's a great example of using that as
a use case to show value because that's
a simple way to do it. I totally
(31:12):
get that. So as far as keeping it
simple goes, the answer to the simple is
if you answer questions in real time
versus trying to anticipate all of them and
creating some very vast knowledge base, that's simpler.
Right? Because instead of saying, let me try
to write everything down and make it searchable
and findable and and still no one will
ever use it. Let's just wait till the
(31:32):
moment of need happens. And then if there
is something I can point to, I'll point
right to the specific part rather than say,
read the document. I'll say, look at this
passage where I've pulled it out and this
is the one that applies. So humans helping
each other is simpler than
giant databases.
And if you think about the earliest days
of knowledge management, which were primarily devoted to
(31:53):
trying to collect documents and put them in
repositories, the idea was if we collect everything,
then we can find everything. And that didn't
work. What works better was the next phase,
which was let's connect people together. And if
I articulate a need to you in real
time, then you can come back to me
and say here. But I don't have to
ask you to write down all your knowledge
(32:14):
in advance. I'm only gonna ask you to
respond at the actual time of need, and
that's simpler than the other approach. Let's just
talk a little bit about what the steps
are that I outlined in that document.
Okay. First of all, it starts with membership.
So when I do my job as leader
of the community, one of them is to
approve membership. Members have to request membership. They
can't join automatically,
(32:34):
and we have a requirement that I know
who they are. There are no anonymous members.
You can't join using your screen name. You
have to say who you are. And so
the question is why why should that be
necessary?
Well, we wanna have a supportive community culture.
And if you have people whose
names aren't known, then that could lead to
them doing things that are undesirable.
(32:55):
So I want people to stand behind. If
they say something, I wanna know who they
are. And if they answer a question, I
wanna know who they are. So you have
to identify yourself. That's the first thing starting
with membership. Then the next thing I mentioned
is this culture, a positive culture. And we've
had one of the SiKMs.
Yeah. It's nurturing. We don't have people, you
know, trying to demean one another or being
harsh with them. If I were to detect
(33:17):
that, that'd be a case where I would
intervene. I would coach them privately and say,
hey, Edwin. You know, be a little kinder
and gentler in your response. And if you
took the advice, great. But if not, if
you persisted, I might tell you that you
have to leave the community. So there's that
aspect of kind of maintaining the culture of
the community.
You already mentioned the role of curation.
That's a big part of what I do
(33:38):
as well. Mhmm. Making sure that threads that
belong together
are kept together.
If someone starts a new thread but really
belongs to another one, I can merge it
into it. If they start if they respond
to a thread with a new one by
mistake, I can split it off. And doing
all that and adding the hashtags and keeping
the titles informative is part of making the
history of all the discussions useful. Right? So
(34:00):
by doing that, it's easier for people to
go back and use all of our nineteen
years worth of discussions, and that's a big
role that I play. So then there's the
whole monthly calls that we do, and there's
all about a little work that goes on
with that. I schedule the call, so I'll
send a note to people and I'll say,
would you be willing to be the the
speaker? And we usually are running about a
year in advance. Alright? I'll say, will you
be willing to speak? And if they say
(34:21):
yes, then I'll add them to the schedule,
and then I'll send them a reminder the
month before and the week before.
He'll send me his slides the day before.
I'll put them in my OneDrive.
I'll share the link with all the people
so that they have it. And then the
day of the call, I'll initiate the call
using freeconferencecall.com.
It's very simple technology. It's audio and slides.
We don't have anything more complicated. And the
(34:43):
idea behind that is nothing should go wrong.
We should have calls that run
technical problems,
and we've been pretty lucky with that. I
record the calls, start recording, end recording, and
as soon as we're done, the the recording's
available. I don't have to do any work.
That's nice.
And we've sent out a summary right afterwards,
which says, here's the link to the recording.
(35:03):
I copy the chat transcript and put that
out. So we have then a recording of
each one of our calls.
Between the online discussions and monitoring and curating
those, dealing with membership, dealing with, occasionally, I
have to go and bouncing, you know, and
I gotta go fix that. Or are they
trying not to get any mail from us?
I say, no. You gotta get mail from
us. We want you to pay attention. We
(35:23):
don't want you to be a joint only
member and not be active. So so there's
some ongoing maintenance that I do in the
community,
but I think I pretty much covered most
of what goes on in my role as
leader. So you're head marketer,
you're head
programmer or project management,
you're curation,
and you're
the cheerleader.
(35:45):
And I hear a bit of being a
combo between a gardener and a policeman
because you're you're playing both roles to nurture
the community, but then police it to make
sure the rules or the agreements are kept
That's right. And people are safe. There's as
aspects of both there. Try to spend more
time on the nurturing
(36:05):
and less time on the policing. Mhmm. But
the policing should be understood that it's there
so that we don't get out of control.
I've been in other communities in the past.
It seemed like they were harsher and that
people felt intimidated at times, and we definitely
don't want that. Or they get filled up
with spam. It's like, who's who's monitoring this
group? It's horrible.
(36:25):
Alright. If you had a group where anybody
can join, which is true of some online
groups, then that's what you end up with.
That's another reason to know who people are
because if they post something that's wrong, you
can go right to them and say, hey.
Don't do that. Well, everything we've talked about
in building a community, I think, is timely
in a lot of ways. Do you have
an example of either a good community from
(36:46):
your history,
other than this work related or not, or
a bad community?
Sure. You don't have to name names, but
what was it about that made it good
or bad? I'll I'll give you a couple
of stories. One company that I worked at,
we had a knowledge management community that was
a closed group. It was only designed to
be for the people that worked in the
(37:06):
Kilometers organization.
And I argued that that was wrong, and
that it should be opened up, including anyone
in the company who was interested because that
would be a good thing. There's a soft
oftentimes, there's an irrational fear that if we
open it up, we're gonna be discussing about
something confidential and some outsider will become aware.
And I asked, what what would that be?
(37:28):
We're not gonna deal with confidential personnel matters
in the community. That's gonna be done through
email. So why would this be a problem?
So, eventually, I was able to persuade powers
that be to change it from closed to
open. And what was interesting is when it
was closed, it had 200 members.
When we opened it up in a relatively
short time, it grew to 2,000 members. Oh.
(37:49):
That's a proof of the value of openness,
which community should be open. Right? They should
be open to the world. As an example
of that, s I k m, even if
you don't join it, all of our online
discussions are open for anyone to read. Right?
You don't have to join to read. You
have to join if you want to post.
But if you want to read, it's open.
So that to me, that's what knowledge management
is supposed to be about. We should be
practicing that. So that would be an example.
(38:10):
We went from bad to good. A bad
community is one, I think, that tries
to enforce rules that really ultimately don't make
sense. I'll give you an example. I was
a member of a community
of community management people,
and I would occasionally share in there. I
if I had written a new article about
community management, I would share a link to
it. I'd say, alright. You're you're all interested
(38:31):
in community management. I've written this article about
whatever. Here's a link to it. And then
people came back and said, no. This violates
the community rule. We don't want self promotion
in the community and viewed it as spam.
And my argument was, well, yeah, I'm against
spam, but do you consider what I just
shared to be spam? Can't you use some
judgment? Yeah. And if if it was just
me endlessly promoting myself, then I should be
(38:53):
slapped on the risk. Right. But if I'm
sharing an article
that's freely available, that's relevant to this community,
how how are you not wanting that to
happen? So I eventually, of course, stop participating.
You can discourage
knowledge sharing rather easily through enforcing silly policies
like that. I think the the key essence
of just like a good conversation,
the key essence is creativity. You're giving an
(39:13):
opportunity to be creative to a degree
in a form of language
that is around problem solving or looking for
help or support or or whatever, a shortcut
to something.
And
that is a reflection,
I think, of most people's
experience
of being raised in a family or a
(39:34):
community or something like that. You've got people
in a support mechanism
to some degree.
Not everybody, but I think in general, people
grow up with people they can count on.
And what you're doing is you're duplicating
this essence of support and people that you
can count on in a formal kind of
a formal way of building a community of
(39:55):
either interest or practice. You know, one thing
that happens pretty often is I get private
emails or LinkedIn messages or that are asking
me some question. This happens pretty often. And
my typical response to them is, I'll be
glad to answer you, but I want you
to post this into the community. And there's
two main reasons I do that. One, there
will be other people who will respond, not
(40:16):
just me, and you'll get a better set
of answers. Number two, there'll be other people
who will benefit from reading what we're discussing.
That's what we're trying to advocate Yeah. As
knowledge managers. Therefore, we should do that. It's
interesting, though, how often we as knowledge managers
do not practice what we preach. We're trying
to simulate collaboration. But let me just ask
you privately, and I'll try to say to
them, you know,
(40:37):
don't you wanna model the behavior that you're
trying to get adopted in your position. And
so I'll push them back. And sometimes they'll
post the community,
and sometimes they won't. But the idea is
I kind of relentlessly
that's applied knowledge management. And there's nothing intimidating
or harmful. If you pose your question, no
one's gonna come down on you. No one's
gonna call you ignorant. By the way, when
I answer them, I always start by thanking
(40:59):
them for the post. That's always my first
line. Thank you for posting. Here's what I
have to say, you know, and then other
people usually respond. So, hopefully, they see that
that works out better than if I just
gave them an answer. Folks, what he's talking
about is the concept of one to one
versus one to many.
And that is such a simple process, but
it's a practice you have to kinda get
(41:19):
around because
exactly. You wanna make that reusable
and more touchable
content. You don't wanna have it between
two people because it's a dead it becomes
a dead
poet kind of thing. It person to person,
it doesn't affect a whole lot of people.
And I think there's probably a little bit
of fear in folks about stepping into a
(41:40):
community.
I bet you there's three times I have
misspelled stuff that I've put in the s
I k m because I
that's why I work. And people are like,
hey. You misspelled that. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Yeah.
Well, you got what I was saying. So,
you know and I think there's a fear
in some people to not do that, to
not put themselves out there. I think it's
actually in most people. Right? Because we have
a rule of thumb that says that 10%
(42:02):
is the number of any community that will
ever post, and 90%
will never post. Therefore, why is that? Well,
I think variety of reasons, but 90% of
the community members either are slightly afraid of
what will happen, or they doubt themselves. They
don't think what they have to say is
worthwhile.
They don't stack up compared to these other
gurus. And so forth.
(42:23):
Who who am I? Right? Who am I
to say anything? And some people try to
overcome that. And I tell them, you can't
overcome that. That is a law of nature.
And you don't even need to try to
overcome it. Just try to get your community
large enough
so that 10% is a meaningful number. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks, Dan. This has been
an exquisite conversation. I appreciate the efforts to,
(42:44):
one, share your story of the SIKM
and this most recent product you've created to
transfer your tacit knowledge. Well, you're welcome, Edwin.
It's always fun talking with you. Any last
tidbits you wish you would have said? I
think we got through
the things in the document. I now I'm
gonna add a little bit more to it,
so that's a good thing.
(43:06):
We're making it more better.
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast and knowledge management.
My name is Sonny Tonemi. As an art
administrator, Because You Need to Know has been
my go to podcast and has helped me
hone my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the
(43:27):
podcast with your name.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
(43:47):
See you next time at Because You Need
to Know. If you'd like to contact us,
please email
byntk@pioneer-ks.org
or find us on LinkedIn.
There is an old adage, one that you
might have heard from a grandparent or village
wise person. The one that says, you get
out what you put in, meaning your efforts
are matched to some degree by the results
or the output.
Now take our nonprofit, Pioneer Knowledge Services, who
delivers this cool program that you're listening to
(00:21):
right now, takes a bunch of effort that
you don't even see. We hope that you
obtain value from our efforts to deliver it
to your powers of reason. Here is where
you come in. You. Yeah. The listeners.
Make our efforts rewarded.
Consider donating to keep us moving forward. Visit
pioneer-ks.org
(00:42):
and click on donate.
The show you're about to experience serves twofold.
First and foremost, this conversation
design elicits knowledge from an experienced individual or
expert.
It is modeled on conversational theory and utilizes
a protagonist,
that's me,
to crack in a deeper knowledge by vigorous
(01:04):
discussion.
Pioneer knowledge services has become adept in this
practice and offers it as a service. Think
of all those super smart people retiring.
Oh, scary.
It is the best way to secure and
transfer knowledge. The other piece of what this
show provides
is a self help guide in leading a
(01:24):
community group. It will aid anyone, as an
example, to lead communities.
Stan Garfield is a true leader in the
field of knowledge management
and has been a friend to Pioneer Knowledge
Services for many years.
Find him on LinkedIn and learn more about
the systems integration and knowledge management leaders community.
(01:50):
Stan Garfield, we have been here before.
Today is a very interesting thing that we're
gonna talk about.
Where are you on the planet, and what's
the latest thing you've been doing? So I
am in Northville, Michigan, which is a suburb
of Detroit. It's about twenty minutes from Ann
Arbor, about thirty minutes from Downtown Detroit. And
what I've been doing today is writing a
(02:11):
little bit about how to cope with all
the things going on in the world today
and trying to help my friends and family
feel at ease with unpleasant developments.
I hear what you're saying. Please send me
a copy. I I could use all the
help I could get. Get. I'll be glad
to. Thank you. Have you ever lived overseas?
I've never lived overseas. I've been in this
area of the country. Well, I've been a
Midwestern
(02:31):
son of the Midwest for most of my
life with an exception of six years spent
in New Jersey. But born in Illinois, lived
in a couple of cities in Illinois, lived
in Omaha, Nebraska,
Saint Louis, Missouri a couple times, and moved
to Michigan
in 1986.
So this is the longest that I've lived
anywhere in my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
What was the introduction to knowledge management that
(02:54):
turned your eye and head to this whole
field? It's something that I probably was always
doing most of my life, which certainly didn't
have a name for it. But even as
a kid, I like to go up to
the blackboard in the classroom and write
little interesting facts or news items to share
with my classmates.
I like to write little newspapers and write
plays and pass things around in school. And
(03:15):
then when I first discovered radio, that was
something that really appealed to me. My friend
and I started a radio station together in
New Jersey back when we were in high
school. Nice. I continued doing that when I
moved to Saint Louis. I did it when
I was at school up in Northwestern.
So, the idea of communicating and being a
journalist always appealed to me. Yeah. And I
thought I was gonna study journalism and become
(03:37):
a journalist, but I got instead turned on
to computer science my freshman year. And I
switched from journalism to computer science and I
graduated from Washington University with degree in computer
science. But I still had that journalist mindset.
So I think combining the two, so it's
been a good thing for being in the
field of knowledge management. So when it finally
came around to where I was spending a
(03:57):
lot of my time sharing information with my
coworkers at digital,
people recognize that. And when it's time to
start a Kilometers program in 1996,
they turned to me and asked me to
to be the one to start it. So
I've been doing it since then, which is
now twenty eight years ago. So you you
took me back to grade school, I presume,
with the
being the person that delivers the news, so
(04:18):
to speak, to be the informer, to be
the transformer of other people by giving them
information and data.
Who in your family
set that experience for you that you thought,
or is it just genetic? Well, I don't
know exactly. I when I write about my
parents, my father was a scholar,
a professor of psychology.
He wrote
(04:39):
number of books. So I think my book
writing, in part, I owe to him. Yeah.
Mom was a a reading specialist and imbued
in me this love of reading, which I've
always had. Mhmm. And she also, interestingly enough,
when she was a student at Antioch College,
she had the title of community manager
Oh, really? Way back in time. But Wow.
So the fact that my parents had that
(05:00):
in their background of reading and writing and
whatever community management meant at that time probably
had some influence on me along the way.
Do you have any example that is a
memory of, like, there was an awareness in
you that, like, you saw something, you experienced
something, you went through something, and you're like,
oh, I'm good at this.
(05:20):
This is what I'm good at. Well, I
think when I started to write,
especially, I remember writing, things that I would
circulate at school when I was in high
school in New Jersey. And people would read
it, and then they'd give me back positive
feedback like this is funny or I, you
know, I'm enjoying this. And like a newsletter?
What do you what do you mean? You
didn't write I actually wrote satirical plays about
(05:40):
the things that went on at school. And
I think it was a way of getting
some of my feelings and frustrations out. You
know, if I didn't care for how the
teachers were teaching, I could satirize that in
this
comic play that I've done.
So so I think getting feedback from that
helped me. People said, I don't wanna read
this.
But they said, yeah. They they wanted it.
And so people would keep asking, let me
(06:02):
see it. Let me see it. And when
I went on the air and started broadcasting,
I got good feedback on that too. And
people like listening to me, especially I did
play by play of the basketball team's games
and and got a lot of praise for
that. I remember being at one game when
I was a senior doing the broadcast of
the game and one of the cheerleaders came
up and had headphones on next to me,
(06:23):
was listening to my broadcast and she told
me, oh, you're really good. You know? So
if you hear that,
that'll encourage you. Yeah. It's an element of
conversation
that has such an interesting richness to it
that there's no other way you could get
to some of the data other than a
conversation. So thank you for and not that
broadcasting is a conversation, but it's still this
(06:44):
You are challenging yourself to communicate well. Yes.
Alright. So let's step into the topic today.
Back in 02/2005,
you created an organization. Can you give me
a little data about what it is and
what it was for? In 02/2005,
I attended the APQC knowledge management conference for
the first time. It was actually held in
(07:06):
Saint Louis that year. It was mostly held
in Houston thereafter, but it was held in
Saint Louis, which is my old hometown. And
I was a presenter there. I think that's
the first time that I was accepted to
present at a Kilometers conference, so that was
a big deal. And as a presenter, I
was asked if I would be willing to
host a birds of a feather lunch session.
And the idea behind this was there'd be
a big round table. I'd put up a
(07:28):
sign with a with a subject on it,
and people who were interested in that subject
would be encouraged to sit down at the
table, and we'd get a quorum of people
and have a conversation over lunch. So what
I put up on the sign was consulting
and systems integration because that was the industry
that I was in. And people filled up
the table. We had a good conversation over
lunch. And at the end of that conversation,
(07:49):
I asked everyone at the table, would you
like to continue this conversation? And they all
said yes. And I said, let me get
your business cards. And I created the community.
I didn't have a name for the community
at the time, but the sign that said
consulting and systems integration.
And so actually, it's my friend Raj Dada
created a Yahoo group for the community, and
he called it SIKM, which stood for systems
(08:12):
integration knowledge management because that was the original
industry focus. I began to solicit people when
I got back from the conference to join
the community, and I later realized that limiting
it to a specific industry didn't make sense.
It was of interest to anyone working in
the field. When the community got created with
that set of letters, s I k m,
it really didn't apply. It was really just
(08:32):
a global knowledge management community, but that term
has stuck with us since then. And it's
kind of funny because people will misread it
and and call it skim or they'll pronounce
it Sikkim.
Or if I say it quickly, when I
say s I k m, they won't necessarily
hear what I'm saying. In any case, it's
just like AQQC used to mean American productivity
and quality center, but they don't use that
(08:53):
anymore. Same thing with SiCam. It doesn't mean
anything. It's just a term that we've had
for the past nineteen years and people recognize.
So who came up with your logo? The
logo came from one of my team members
at HP, Marcus Funka.
I think he created it to use as
a logo for our cam community when we
were all at Hewlett Packard together many years
(09:14):
ago. So I use that Mhmm. As the
logo for SI Cam. For the listener, what
it is is it looks like a bunch
of stick people in a circle with their
heads in the center of the circle, meaning
we're bringing our heads together. That would be
my interpretation.
It's just a great graphic, so I wanted
to hear about that. Well, the interesting thing
is is folks, we got together. Stan and
(09:36):
I had a chat here a couple weeks
ago, and we talked about
transfer of knowledge, making sure succession planning is
all set, and all the parts and pieces
of what that all means.
And through our conversation, we were like,
oh, you don't really have anything for everything
you know and everything you've created with the
SIKM.
(09:57):
Maybe it's time to build a product. And
then from that conversation, it was like, why
don't we just do a podcast about that
product and talk about the
process? Because it is a useful tool to
get into a behavior and a practice for
anyone
to be able to have a handoff packet
to whoever's standing around, whoever's next
(10:18):
if you're not there. It's a historical marker.
It is a data process
collector. It it's a little bit of everything.
Can you give me what you would define
this product you created? It's about folks, it's
about four pages in a Word doc. Yeah.
The origin of this stems from discussion
we had during our presentation that I was
(10:38):
generally giving with Dinesh Gerbi and Patrick Lam
at the Now It's Summit Dublin Conference. And
during that session, which was on mentoring, Patrick
raised the question of, you know, SiCam is
strongly identified with me as the leader. Some
people think of it as my community.
It's not my community, but I've been the
creator and the leader of it. But the
question was, what's next? What's the succession plan?
(11:00):
If I suddenly disappear, what would happen to
it? Would it disappear also? I don't want
it to disappear. I'd like it to continue
on. So with that in mind, I raised
the subject of, you know, who's going to
be the person who I can hand the
reins to. And then in the discussion that
we had, it became clear that I should
probably try to document what I do. Typically,
people like me will say, well, it does
not that much. I don't spend that much
(11:21):
time. It's pretty easy. I can tell you
I can tell you in a few sentences,
and it's kind of intuitive. But it's really
more than that. So what I did was
I took from, you know, many different articles
that I had written in the past about
this and distilled them into a document. I
added some things that were missing. I went
through a second rev. And today, when looking
at it, I realized I have to add
some more things. So it's probably gonna keep
(11:42):
evolving.
But it's pretty close, I think Yeah. To
containing most of the concepts
of what I do as a community leader
so that other people could take that up
and carry it on. So what what what
do you think is missing? And, folks, we're
just talking, like, to me, it's the who,
what, where, when, how, why kinda collection,
going back to your journalism mentality. It is
trying to get all the parts of the
(12:04):
puzzle on one spot to at least be
a start point for somebody else. Yeah. So
today,
I was actually looking at some posts that
were made today in the SI CAM leaders
online discussion,
and one of them was about knowledge retention.
So this typically comes up a lot in
the community. People will raise a question that
we've actually discussed before, and they may or
may not be aware of that. And there's
(12:24):
nothing wrong with that. You know, it used
to be there was a culture aspect of
early communities that if you were to ask
a question that had already been asked, you'd
get slapped on the wrist because you didn't
search first. But I never believed in that.
I don't wanna discourage anybody for asking a
question. But what I wanna do is I
wanna point them back to where we discussed
before so they're not starting from scratch. So
today, as I was doing that, what I
do is I go in and I I
(12:45):
respond to the person. The person who posted
it had already gotten several good responses, but
I responded with two links. One was to
a specific thread that we had had on
this topic of offboarding, which is what the
post was about. And secondly, to the hashtag
now is retention, which goes to all of
the threads we've had over the years on
this subject. So that the original person could
see, well, here's a thread that's very specific
(13:07):
to what you've asked about. And then here
are all the other ones that may be
valuable to you as well. Now I realized
in doing that that I hadn't included that
aspect of
monitoring and then making sure that you point
people back to their previous thread. So that's
something that that I will have. You're serving
as a curator and a leader of a
community
and a, I hate to say the word,
(13:28):
agitator, but you keep things
moving. Right? There's a point where you can't
just sit and watch everything just happen. You
have to be a participant
and give people shortcuts and and help them.
That's what your intent is. Right. So one
of the things that I think is very
important for any community leader is to monitor
the discussions, be aware of each thing that's
being posted. Mhmm. Or you have to be
(13:50):
on top of that. Then in many cases,
you really don't have to do anything further.
If the community's responding
and the person who started discussion is getting
value from the responses,
good. Sometimes I may have something to add.
I usually don't wanna be the first voice
to respond. I don't want it to make
it feel like I'm a know it all
and other people are discouraged from giving their
(14:11):
answers. So I will wait for other people
to respond. And after a while, if I
have something to add, then I will. Sometimes
I don't have anything to add and I'll
just stay out of it. But the times
that I really jump in are times where
in the case of today where the threat's
not the first one and I wanna make
sure they realize we've discussed that before and
take advantage of it. And the other case
is where there's no responses. So that's the
(14:32):
thing you really guard against after a few
days if somebody's asked a question and no
one's answered it, then it's my duty to
make sure that something happens. Now there's several
things that I can do. Mhmm. I can
answer it myself.
I can respond and say, hey, can anyone
else in the community answer as prompt? As
a prompt. Yeah. Nudge them into doing it.
Yeah. Yeah. And that often works. And there's
other times where I might go offline, send
(14:54):
a private message to someone who I think
can answer this and see if they'll either
go into the community and answer it there.
Or if not, send me an answer that
I can post in reply. So those are
the kinds of things that I can do
to make sure that they do get a
response, and so they're not just sitting there
frustrated by the lack of an answer. So
what you just explained to me, is that
covered in this document?
Yes. It's, it's covered in the document, but
(15:16):
it's also the part that I was gonna
add. So the idea of monitoring the discussions,
making sure the answers get provided. But I'm
gonna add things specifically about now interestingly enough,
I've written about all these things. I've written
a book on community management. So it's all
in there. Just haven't pulled out that part,
made it specific to this document yet. One
point in here that I kinda caught my
eye that you
(15:36):
keep an eye on hashtags.
And if you only find one hashtag,
it seems to be a a point to
to pull it out of there. Is that
right? The hashtags in the community are something
that I curate. And probably most hashtags that
we need have have already been created. There's
always a chance that we could need some
new ones and not ruling that out. But
(15:57):
what sometimes happens is some I would describe
it as some people get hashtag happy. Yes.
And they'll post lots and lots of hashtags.
And in social media, that's almost a way
of communicating and expressing. But in in knowledge
management, not so much. Right? It should be
a different function, which is to tie together
all the related threads. But if you introduce
a new hashtag, which is a variant of
(16:19):
one we already have, that actually works against
the purpose. Yeah. Because instead of pulling them
together, you now have redundant hashtags. So as
a hashtag curator,
I'll make sure two things. Number one, and
this is the most common scenario, people post
with no hashtag. That's the most common. In
which case, I will add one to their
thread. Alright. I'll just make sure that it's
tagged so it can be found with other
(16:40):
related threads. And the other case is they
add hashtags which we didn't have and then
I'll look at it and see is that
one we should be adding? If so, fine.
If not, can I use a different one
that we've already used? Alright. So that's kind
of what I'm doing. But if they create
sort of a one off hashtag that I
doubt will ever be used again, that's the
case you're asking about. Then in that case,
I'll remove that hashtag Yeah. Because I don't
(17:00):
think it's helping or adding value. But it's
a subjective thing. But mostly, we have enough
hashtags already. So, like, today, when they talk
about knowledge retention, we have that hashtag. Right?
So what I wanna make sure, they don't
create a new hashtag slightly different Yeah. Or
or misspelled.
Right? Or misspelled. Right. Yeah.
So let's talk about hashtags because I find
them very peculiar because it seems to me
(17:24):
wild guess here. Maybe 70% of the population
does not ever use them. Would that I
mean, do you see that as kind of
a where would you guess the majority of
the folks are? Are they using them or
they're not using? I think your 70% is
probably pretty good. And so the 70% that
don't, I add a hashtag. And by the
way, I don't have any problem with that.
It sounds like I would go on the
warpath and say you must add as no.
(17:46):
I'll add it. And that way, I can
ensure they don't add a misspelled one. Right?
So it's probably a net positive. The flip
side, the other 30% include we even had
several instances where there's no subject at all
in the post, just a string of hashtags.
Well, that's not good. It doesn't really explain
what this post is about using, you know,
the normal sentence structure.
So in that case, I'll add a subject
(18:07):
that tries to explain it to the community
and then maybe reduce the number of hashtags
down to the ones that are essential. What
has changed?
Let's talk about from 02/2005,
it looks like the big muscle movements of
this organization
are the listserv or the forum
and monthly calls and something new that has
(18:27):
been added recently. Something new that's been added
is? The mentoring piece? So the mentoring program
was created last year Mhmm. And Ninez Derby
took the lead on that in conjunction with
Patrick Lamb. And I participated in the initial
version, and it's done in conjunction with another
community, k m four dev. Between the two
communities,
Nines has solicited both volunteers to be mentors
(18:49):
and to be mentees.
So I believe it's a good program. We've
actually added a subgroup in our online community
for that specific program so that the mentees
have their own communication channel. But for general
sharing, I discourage that. I don't want them,
you know, asking questions there that could have
been asked to a larger community. But if
they need to communicate just about the mentoring
program, that's appropriate. So that program exists as
(19:11):
a sub program underneath SI CAM, but normally
it's promoted within the SiCam community and within
cam four dev. So that's an example of
a program which we've added. As you mentioned,
the online discussions, that's the number one thing
that we do. And the number two thing
is our monthly calls. We've had a monthly
call every month since we started, so I'm
proud of that. It's an hour long. It's
(19:31):
always on the same day of the month
with occasional exceptions. Okay. But normally, it's the
third Tuesday of the month. It's at 11AM
eastern time, which allows there to be West
Coast participation in The US. It allows there
to be afternoon participation in Europe. It's not
ideal for Asia. So every once in a
while, when we have a speaker from Australia,
then we'll have a call at a different
time to accommodate that. Would you term all
(19:52):
this activity in the common phrase as a
community of practice? Yes. I would say it's
a community of practice. The people in it
are practicing knowledge management, and they're brought together
for their common passion for that subject.
We have people who are long term veterans
who use it as a way of helping
others. We have lots and lots of newcomers
to the field who are using it to
(20:13):
learn, and we have a lot of people
in between
that both learn and contribute. Where do you
see it going in twenty years? I would
imagine
that it'll keep on as it has. You
know, it's been going almost for twenty years,
so I have no reason to believe that
that won't continue.
People have often proposed that knowledge management is
dead or dying. I don't agree with that.
Yeah. I think it's always gonna be needed.
(20:35):
So if it's always gonna be needed, why
is it gonna be dead? It's it goes
through cycles. Yeah. Right? In every company I've
been at, there's a cycle of enthusiasm and
and then abandonment, but it always comes back
because the need never goes away. It never
goes away because we're talking about people and
behaviors. Right.
Let's go back to community of practice. Can
you explain to people what the
(20:56):
you and I know, but I want the
listener to get a fuller understanding of why
anybody, any organization
would consider creating a community of practice. The
reason that communities exist is that organizations typically
have boundaries within them. They have organizational
silos based on org charts and structures,
and those often are resistant to communication across
(21:18):
those boundaries.
Fundamental purpose of a community is to cut
across those boundaries and to allow everyone in
an organization, regardless of which structure they're under,
to come together
in their shared interests so they can learn
together. So if you're in a very
structured environment where you only report under this
vertical structure, you never communicate with anyone in
a different structure. Community is designed to try
(21:39):
to cut across those so that people who
have the same interest but would otherwise never
know one another, never interact, never work together,
can become aware of each other through the
community. And the beauty of it is if
you get everyone in an organization who shares
the same interests in the community, then you
can guarantee
that there's a way for information and knowledge
to flow across those boundaries. We call that
(22:01):
boundary spanning and that's really one of the
fundamental roles of it. But above that, it's
people volunteering to join. They're not Yeah. Forced
to join. In fact, if you're forced to
join a community, that doesn't work. But if
you join voluntarily
and you put forth the energy at least
to pay attention to what the community is
discussing, then you get something out of it.
You learn, you have resources you can count
(22:21):
on, you have problems to solve, you have
people to help you solve them. And it's
often people that you don't know. Typically, people
will start with people they notice of a
problem. And if I turn to the person
sitting next to me and they don't have
the answer, I can throw up my hands.
But in the community, I can go to
the community and pose that problem. And someone
somewhere in the world that I may never
have heard of before will come back with
an answer, and that's the power of community.
(22:43):
The interesting thing is that I think most
people have a misconception
that if an organization, a company, a firm
wants to create a community practice, that it
has to be work related. Well, one of
the distinctions you can use is that you
can call the other thing a community of
interest.
A community of practice typically revolves around work
related topics, things that we're practicing because they're
(23:04):
part of our work. A community of interest
is something that may not be work related,
but that we still share a passion for.
I've always advocated that the that should both
be supported by any organization, both types. Mhmm.
Even things that are not at all work
related. Yeah. Why should you do that? Why
wouldn't that be wasting time at work and
wasting resources? Well, the answer is, if you
(23:25):
get people active in communities of interest, let's
say you have a runner's community, then they
get used to using communities for that. And
then when you ask them to use them
for work related topics,
they're already accustomed to it, and they can
use the tools, so it transfers very nicely.
So if you encourage both communities of interest
and communities of practice side by side,
the benefit is that people will fundamentally be
(23:47):
comfortable with using communities for both purposes. I
like the side by side because you're you're
dealing with people and then organizational
structures and purpose
in the same stroke of the brush,
and it would be a great rollout to
have them in tandem.
In in my aspect of the community of
interest,
it adds so much value
(24:09):
of connection, of community building, of understanding
other parts,
just all those things
that are really incidental to the organization. It's
not like the organization wants this to happen
because x is gonna be a product.
It enriches
the work culture because people
have to have some trust in order to
(24:30):
communicate
in an authentic
way. And these types of activities build that
practice. That's right. By building that trust and
trusting in the idea of community and and
the idea of connecting with your fellow peers
across your organization, you share an interest. That's
very similar then to what how community of
practice works. So you'll feel that you can
(24:51):
trust that as well. So I think the
other thing is if someone's used to leading
a community of interest, then that skill transfers
nicely. So if they lead a community of
practice, they already kinda know what to do
and that's useful. And then the other thing
is it's probably good for the company. Right?
The company who has communities of interest probably
helps retain employees because they feel good. But
(25:11):
my interest is actually there's an outlet for
it here. I could meet other runners or
other music lovers or other photographers.
These are my hobbies, but the community that
exists is being supported by the company I
work for. That's a good thing.
I enjoy that, and I'll stay here. What
would be your top three things to nurture
a young organization or old that is listening
(25:32):
and saying, boy, we really should try that.
What would be the three things they'd really
need to look at? Well, as communities grow,
this gets to be more and more of
a need. When you're a small fledgling company
and you can all sit in one room,
that's you probably can be aware of what
everybody else is doing. And if you have
to ask something, you just turn across the
room. That's a case where a community doesn't
have to be that formal. But as soon
(25:53):
as you get bigger than that, which most
companies aspire to, and they have different offices
and and they keep growing,
then it becomes more and more necessary. And
when it gets to be a giant global
corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees, it's
almost guaranteed
that you won't know what the rest of
the organization knows. You won't know what they've
done. You won't know the people. You won't
be able to take advantage of what they've
(26:14):
already done. And communities allow you to do
that because it tends to break down the
giant organization into the subcomponents
of the things that are important. So what
I think you want, you wanna have one
community.
By the way, you wanna have exactly one,
not more than one, but one community
for each important topic to the organization.
If you have more than one, you have
the problem of redundancy where you don't know
(26:36):
what community to join and you splinter the
knowledge into different silos. But if you have
one community,
that's desirable. And they wanna have one for
each important topic. You don't wanna be missing
one. Right? So if I'm a project manager,
I want there to be a project management
community. And if I'm an engineer, I want
there to be an engineer community. Right? But
you figure this out. You know what's important?
Maybe Yeah. Depending on the size of your
(26:57):
company, that could be 10 topics. It could
be 30. It's gonna vary. But however many
there are, if you create a community for
each one and you encourage all of your
employees to join the one that's most relevant
to their work, then you can get this,
what I call the the promise that you
can make to them is, if you need
anything or if you have a problem to
solve or you have a question to ask
(27:17):
or you have a resource you're looking for,
go to the community for that topic. Mhmm.
Pose your need there, and you will get
what you need. And that's a pretty powerful
promise to be able to make. Organizationally,
how would you suggest these folks that are
gonna start this for the first time,
how do they get provability
on return of investment,
a measurement? What what do you measure that
(27:39):
makes any difference to the c suite of
why are we doing this? Well, in general,
that question of ROI for all of knowledge
management is a little bit of a red
herring because you can't really prove anything like
that because there's too many variables. What I
say is communities lend themselves
to being able to answer the question, what's
the value of the community?
Because the value is demonstrated by the daily
(28:00):
activities in the community.
So each time someone
posts a question and gets an answer and
then they respond back by saying, thanks. That
was really helpful. That's proof of the value
of the community. And you can collect all
those instances
and then show anyone who is a skeptic
and say, you're wondering about a community. Let
me show you these, you know, 100 examples
of our actual employees getting actual help and
(28:22):
thanking the the person who helped them. By
the way, can you do that for any
other investment? You can't prove it as readily
as you can with the community. So to
me, you can answer the question. You just
can't do a a numerical computation. Right? It's
I mean, you you you can get numeric
in the the number of memberships or the
number of posts or the number of responses,
those types of things. But do they really
(28:43):
mean a whole lot? Because, again, we're getting
to the the value of transfer of whatever
that data was or information
that may have changed somebody's
decision metric or
execution of trying to do something or or
or. I love the opportunity when I tell
people that looking for a way to figure
out how to do something.
(29:05):
I bought a new John Deere tractor.
It had a front end snowblower.
I look at the manual,
and I'm like, oh my good gosh. I
am gonna go berserk trying to figure out
these stupid images.
I just searched,
and there was a YouTube video. So let
me let me I just wanna tell this
because as a knowledge person and somebody that's,
(29:25):
you know, worked around the field of developing
knowledge products, training products for the military, all
those sorts of things, you try to get
to whatever is the easiest way to to
get it to the person.
I found a video of a dude
that didn't say anything.
There was no audio. There was no text.
There was it just was a recording
of him
(29:46):
going through the steps
of putting this this thing on, and it
was enough. It was about a five minute
video. Play it, and then I'd okay. I
do that. And it becomes a mimicking
there's there's not any barrier. I can just
visually see it and then do it. And
I think a lot of people over complicate
items like the product you just created,
(30:07):
which is the essence of what the role
is you do for s I k m.
How do you keep it simple? What's your
advice of just keep it simple?
Well, I think keeping it simple is real
important. I just wanna piggyback on your example
there. In general, whenever I ever have to
find out the answer about how to solve
a problem, what I found over many years
(30:28):
is it's much more likely that I'll find
it by doing a search over the Internet,
and I'll probably find some equivalent of a
community. Right? An online forum, a bulletin board,
a Reddit, whatever I'm gonna find where it's
been solved and I get my helpful answer.
It's much more likely that I'll find it
there than I will in the company's
online support
database. Right? So I think that's another proof
(30:50):
of community over, as you're saying, the manual.
So I can go to their support forum
and I can look for it and I'll
search and I won't find it. Some discussion
forum that answered that question. Right? So That's
another proof of the value of communities. And
the good news is those are online and
we can search for them and find them.
That's a great example of using that as
a use case to show value because that's
a simple way to do it. I totally
(31:12):
get that. So as far as keeping it
simple goes, the answer to the simple is
if you answer questions in real time
versus trying to anticipate all of them and
creating some very vast knowledge base, that's simpler.
Right? Because instead of saying, let me try
to write everything down and make it searchable
and findable and and still no one will
ever use it. Let's just wait till the
(31:32):
moment of need happens. And then if there
is something I can point to, I'll point
right to the specific part rather than say,
read the document. I'll say, look at this
passage where I've pulled it out and this
is the one that applies. So humans helping
each other is simpler than
giant databases.
And if you think about the earliest days
of knowledge management, which were primarily devoted to
(31:53):
trying to collect documents and put them in
repositories, the idea was if we collect everything,
then we can find everything. And that didn't
work. What works better was the next phase,
which was let's connect people together. And if
I articulate a need to you in real
time, then you can come back to me
and say here. But I don't have to
ask you to write down all your knowledge
(32:14):
in advance. I'm only gonna ask you to
respond at the actual time of need, and
that's simpler than the other approach. Let's just
talk a little bit about what the steps
are that I outlined in that document.
Okay. First of all, it starts with membership.
So when I do my job as leader
of the community, one of them is to
approve membership. Members have to request membership. They
can't join automatically,
(32:34):
and we have a requirement that I know
who they are. There are no anonymous members.
You can't join using your screen name. You
have to say who you are. And so
the question is why why should that be
necessary?
Well, we wanna have a supportive community culture.
And if you have people whose
names aren't known, then that could lead to
them doing things that are undesirable.
(32:55):
So I want people to stand behind. If
they say something, I wanna know who they
are. And if they answer a question, I
wanna know who they are. So you have
to identify yourself. That's the first thing starting
with membership. Then the next thing I mentioned
is this culture, a positive culture. And we've
had one of the SiKMs.
Yeah. It's nurturing. We don't have people, you
know, trying to demean one another or being
harsh with them. If I were to detect
(33:17):
that, that'd be a case where I would
intervene. I would coach them privately and say,
hey, Edwin. You know, be a little kinder
and gentler in your response. And if you
took the advice, great. But if not, if
you persisted, I might tell you that you
have to leave the community. So there's that
aspect of kind of maintaining the culture of
the community.
You already mentioned the role of curation.
That's a big part of what I do
(33:38):
as well. Mhmm. Making sure that threads that
belong together
are kept together.
If someone starts a new thread but really
belongs to another one, I can merge it
into it. If they start if they respond
to a thread with a new one by
mistake, I can split it off. And doing
all that and adding the hashtags and keeping
the titles informative is part of making the
history of all the discussions useful. Right? So
(34:00):
by doing that, it's easier for people to
go back and use all of our nineteen
years worth of discussions, and that's a big
role that I play. So then there's the
whole monthly calls that we do, and there's
all about a little work that goes on
with that. I schedule the call, so I'll
send a note to people and I'll say,
would you be willing to be the the
speaker? And we usually are running about a
year in advance. Alright? I'll say, will you
be willing to speak? And if they say
(34:21):
yes, then I'll add them to the schedule,
and then I'll send them a reminder the
month before and the week before.
He'll send me his slides the day before.
I'll put them in my OneDrive.
I'll share the link with all the people
so that they have it. And then the
day of the call, I'll initiate the call
using freeconferencecall.com.
It's very simple technology. It's audio and slides.
We don't have anything more complicated. And the
(34:43):
idea behind that is nothing should go wrong.
We should have calls that run
technical problems,
and we've been pretty lucky with that. I
record the calls, start recording, end recording, and
as soon as we're done, the the recording's
available. I don't have to do any work.
That's nice.
And we've sent out a summary right afterwards,
which says, here's the link to the recording.
(35:03):
I copy the chat transcript and put that
out. So we have then a recording of
each one of our calls.
Between the online discussions and monitoring and curating
those, dealing with membership, dealing with, occasionally, I
have to go and bouncing, you know, and
I gotta go fix that. Or are they
trying not to get any mail from us?
I say, no. You gotta get mail from
us. We want you to pay attention. We
(35:23):
don't want you to be a joint only
member and not be active. So so there's
some ongoing maintenance that I do in the
community,
but I think I pretty much covered most
of what goes on in my role as
leader. So you're head marketer,
you're head
programmer or project management,
you're curation,
and you're
the cheerleader.
(35:45):
And I hear a bit of being a
combo between a gardener and a policeman
because you're you're playing both roles to nurture
the community, but then police it to make
sure the rules or the agreements are kept
That's right. And people are safe. There's as
aspects of both there. Try to spend more
time on the nurturing
(36:05):
and less time on the policing. Mhmm. But
the policing should be understood that it's there
so that we don't get out of control.
I've been in other communities in the past.
It seemed like they were harsher and that
people felt intimidated at times, and we definitely
don't want that. Or they get filled up
with spam. It's like, who's who's monitoring this
group? It's horrible.
(36:25):
Alright. If you had a group where anybody
can join, which is true of some online
groups, then that's what you end up with.
That's another reason to know who people are
because if they post something that's wrong, you
can go right to them and say, hey.
Don't do that. Well, everything we've talked about
in building a community, I think, is timely
in a lot of ways. Do you have
an example of either a good community from
(36:46):
your history,
other than this work related or not, or
a bad community?
Sure. You don't have to name names, but
what was it about that made it good
or bad? I'll I'll give you a couple
of stories. One company that I worked at,
we had a knowledge management community that was
a closed group. It was only designed to
be for the people that worked in the
(37:06):
Kilometers organization.
And I argued that that was wrong, and
that it should be opened up, including anyone
in the company who was interested because that
would be a good thing. There's a soft
oftentimes, there's an irrational fear that if we
open it up, we're gonna be discussing about
something confidential and some outsider will become aware.
And I asked, what what would that be?
(37:28):
We're not gonna deal with confidential personnel matters
in the community. That's gonna be done through
email. So why would this be a problem?
So, eventually, I was able to persuade powers
that be to change it from closed to
open. And what was interesting is when it
was closed, it had 200 members.
When we opened it up in a relatively
short time, it grew to 2,000 members. Oh.
(37:49):
That's a proof of the value of openness,
which community should be open. Right? They should
be open to the world. As an example
of that, s I k m, even if
you don't join it, all of our online
discussions are open for anyone to read. Right?
You don't have to join to read. You
have to join if you want to post.
But if you want to read, it's open.
So that to me, that's what knowledge management
is supposed to be about. We should be
practicing that. So that would be an example.
(38:10):
We went from bad to good. A bad
community is one, I think, that tries
to enforce rules that really ultimately don't make
sense. I'll give you an example. I was
a member of a community
of community management people,
and I would occasionally share in there. I
if I had written a new article about
community management, I would share a link to
it. I'd say, alright. You're you're all interested
(38:31):
in community management. I've written this article about
whatever. Here's a link to it. And then
people came back and said, no. This violates
the community rule. We don't want self promotion
in the community and viewed it as spam.
And my argument was, well, yeah, I'm against
spam, but do you consider what I just
shared to be spam? Can't you use some
judgment? Yeah. And if if it was just
me endlessly promoting myself, then I should be
(38:53):
slapped on the risk. Right. But if I'm
sharing an article
that's freely available, that's relevant to this community,
how how are you not wanting that to
happen? So I eventually, of course, stop participating.
You can discourage
knowledge sharing rather easily through enforcing silly policies
like that. I think the the key essence
of just like a good conversation,
the key essence is creativity. You're giving an
(39:13):
opportunity to be creative to a degree
in a form of language
that is around problem solving or looking for
help or support or or whatever, a shortcut
to something.
And
that is a reflection,
I think, of most people's
experience
of being raised in a family or a
(39:34):
community or something like that. You've got people
in a support mechanism
to some degree.
Not everybody, but I think in general, people
grow up with people they can count on.
And what you're doing is you're duplicating
this essence of support and people that you
can count on in a formal kind of
a formal way of building a community of
(39:55):
either interest or practice. You know, one thing
that happens pretty often is I get private
emails or LinkedIn messages or that are asking
me some question. This happens pretty often. And
my typical response to them is, I'll be
glad to answer you, but I want you
to post this into the community. And there's
two main reasons I do that. One, there
will be other people who will respond, not
(40:16):
just me, and you'll get a better set
of answers. Number two, there'll be other people
who will benefit from reading what we're discussing.
That's what we're trying to advocate Yeah. As
knowledge managers. Therefore, we should do that. It's
interesting, though, how often we as knowledge managers
do not practice what we preach. We're trying
to simulate collaboration. But let me just ask
you privately, and I'll try to say to
them, you know,
(40:37):
don't you wanna model the behavior that you're
trying to get adopted in your position. And
so I'll push them back. And sometimes they'll
post the community,
and sometimes they won't. But the idea is
I kind of relentlessly
that's applied knowledge management. And there's nothing intimidating
or harmful. If you pose your question, no
one's gonna come down on you. No one's
gonna call you ignorant. By the way, when
I answer them, I always start by thanking
(40:59):
them for the post. That's always my first
line. Thank you for posting. Here's what I
have to say, you know, and then other
people usually respond. So, hopefully, they see that
that works out better than if I just
gave them an answer. Folks, what he's talking
about is the concept of one to one
versus one to many.
And that is such a simple process, but
it's a practice you have to kinda get
(41:19):
around because
exactly. You wanna make that reusable
and more touchable
content. You don't wanna have it between
two people because it's a dead it becomes
a dead
poet kind of thing. It person to person,
it doesn't affect a whole lot of people.
And I think there's probably a little bit
of fear in folks about stepping into a
(41:40):
community.
I bet you there's three times I have
misspelled stuff that I've put in the s
I k m because I
that's why I work. And people are like,
hey. You misspelled that. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Yeah.
Well, you got what I was saying. So,
you know and I think there's a fear
in some people to not do that, to
not put themselves out there. I think it's
actually in most people. Right? Because we have
a rule of thumb that says that 10%
(42:02):
is the number of any community that will
ever post, and 90%
will never post. Therefore, why is that? Well,
I think variety of reasons, but 90% of
the community members either are slightly afraid of
what will happen, or they doubt themselves. They
don't think what they have to say is
worthwhile.
They don't stack up compared to these other
gurus. And so forth.
(42:23):
Who who am I? Right? Who am I
to say anything? And some people try to
overcome that. And I tell them, you can't
overcome that. That is a law of nature.
And you don't even need to try to
overcome it. Just try to get your community
large enough
so that 10% is a meaningful number. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks, Dan. This has been
an exquisite conversation. I appreciate the efforts to,
(42:44):
one, share your story of the SIKM
and this most recent product you've created to
transfer your tacit knowledge. Well, you're welcome, Edwin.
It's always fun talking with you. Any last
tidbits you wish you would have said? I
think we got through
the things in the document. I now I'm
gonna add a little bit more to it,
so that's a good thing.
(43:06):
We're making it more better.
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast and knowledge management.
My name is Sonny Tonemi. As an art
administrator, Because You Need to Know has been
my go to podcast and has helped me
hone my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the
(43:27):
podcast with your name.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
(43:47):
See you next time at Because You Need
to Know. If you'd like to contact us,
please email
byntk@pioneer-ks.org
or find us on LinkedIn.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.