Preparing
for Conversations with Chris Macrae
GAPS: KM As
It Is, Could Have Been, Will Be
Chris Macrae
European
KnowledgeBoard Editor
Independent Consultant
Warning: Chris Macrae's mind literally
bristles with complex, concurrent and connected thoughts on all
things knowledgeable which may leave the observer awash and the
participant gasping for the breath to keep up with his pace.
We have titled this STAR Series Dialogue "Gaps" and
Chris begins with a few of them currently bounding around in
his very fertile head.
Follow him if you
can, if you dare!
 Opening
Thoughts by Chris Macrae
The main homework
I would like people to do (prior to our Dialogue) is to question
what is the (system) gap between where we are (and are heading)
and where we could have been (and been heading) with the whole
revolution of networks, globalisation, knowledge work etc.
It would be good
if we could make the search for big change agendas whose barriers
we haven't systemically passed through a communal activity; it
might even heal some territorial dis putes
in KM that don't seem to be getting better.
A few starting points:
This manifesto launched
recently to celebrate the 5th year since the advent of cluetrain.com
(itself a cry that we are not making the most of community) is
a hot start for me because its manifesto is on joining Emotional Literacy & KM.
It also is supported
by a group set of bookmarks I have made.
Note: Cluetrain Manifesto co-author
David Weinberger
was an early STAR moderator:
I would like something
on how far the gap is between what I think you call Personal
KM and its potential. For me the hub of all this is Drucker's
original view of the knowledge worker (and self-organising as
a tense system whose conflict with hierarchy needs whole system
design changes) and the continuing work of his Claremont school
mainly led by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with his focus on flow
and joy of accomplishment as system energies of good business.
I don't know the best starting bookmark to show the gap though
a related source is Gallup's 1.5 million interviews showing most
people don't feel they get a chance to make use of their greatest
talents at work.
Then there are issues
about: the social/sustainable/reconciliation impacts of globalisation,
and large scale change -- probably the best starting point on
this are www.simpol.org.uk.
and the search of open space cases alongside this the data
collected by the world economic forum on plummeting trust in
big organsiations of every type and everywhere.
We might explore
whether we understand the adaptivity and critical boundary transparencies
needed for partner networks to compound growth instead of falling
apart through lack of resiliency and opaqueness to critical knowledge
flows or risks -- even things like whether we teach our kids
how to use email, social networks and advance the net generation
in the way that e.g. Tapscott first started advocating nearly
10 years ago. See my module on how to do email.
And ultimately back
to we don't have measures to grow intangibles as the core multiplier
of wealth and the strategic innovation that service and knowledge
economies should be about if we are to go beyond the industrial
age, its zero sum science of planning, and its discrimination
against investing in people and in favour of machines.
A company's most
vital measurements those connected to whether it is compounding
growth or destruction -are not being audited.
Worse the numbers
that are most frequently measured are by themselves providing
signals that conflict with systemic growth as mapped by value
exchange theory of a firm.
It does not particularly
matter what we call these measurements which make the future
(the organisation is compounding) measurable, though there is
a set of mathematical reasons for calling this dynamic valuation
of intangibles.
Depending how much
time I have, I may be able to build a few more cluster references
like the second of the first pair of bookmarks above which follows
up emotional literacy. But also if you know where the KM community
most likes to start on the sorts of gaps I am talking about,
I expect you may be closer as I know where the controversies
are but some are not worded in KM's favourite languages, and
some go very directly to what's wrong with corporate systems
such as www.thecorporation.com. But this seems to be too scary
a starting point for the broad KM community to want to start
a coherent conversation around in virtuals rather linear modes
of conversation.
Of course there's
my general web at www.valuetrue.com
which includes my survey on the 10 networks most likely to collaborate
and change the world in the matrix's row 2, column 1:
And my blog as an update on intangibles crisis.
And the game, Designer
Group, on what are the common visual components of human
relations systems.
Wherever the Conversation
with Chris Macrae starts, it will find plenty of gaps in
the continuing quest to find a way to deal with the knowledge
phenomenon. Get your thinking caps on.
Jerry
Ash
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Biography
I worked for most
of the 1990s in large management consultancies and communications
agencies. These days I work as independent but with fairly regular
partners from similar backgrounds.
As a writer, my
trilogy of practitioner books will be completed later in the
year with a co-authored work explaining why intangibles cannot
be reported in conventional accounting terms. We map intangibles
as the system of relationships connecting knowledge productivities
and stakeholders' value demands. Subsystems of knowledge productivity
include hierarchy, the selection of self-organising modes the
organisations uses (e.g., selection from teams, social networks,
practice communities, portal interfaces, etc.) and flows through
boundaries of a network of organisations. Typical stakeholder
demands to be integrated are those of employees, customers, owners,
business partners and societal partners.
Mathematically,
we can argue that intangibles comprise relationships across the
organisation, which cannot be counted by separation into parts
because its value is in connections and dynamic as a system whole.
This can literally change knowledge in fundamental ways. At the
limit valuation across stakeholder is multiplicative not additive;
so you can lose all if one stakeholder sees you as worthless
as happened when society completely lost trust in Andersen.
The implication
of this is that an organisation must openly detect conflicts
between stakeholders and resolve them before they compound period
after period; similarly it must ensure that there are no disconnects
between its internal action and learning flows; otherwise one
employee could zeroise an organisation as with Baring's Leeson,
or one partner could cause another's destruction as happened
to Swissair
Moreover, an organisation's
deepest human purpose needs context specific measures of the
opposite kind to generic short-term ones. The latter where they
rule alone are perfect maths for eroding purpose and knowledge
sharing as happened tragically in NASA's loss of safety its big
human goal that wasn't measured with the same compounding intensity
as costs and schedules that were governed by quarterly numbers.
We can also model
how emotional flows matter at last as much to corporate health
as cashflow. It is time that economics interacted with the networking
age and it will only do this by discovering how to include emotional
literacy factors in its compass. Economics and societal development
must be win-wins in my view of futures worthy of all people's
lifetimes. It is surely the best time to go beyond zero-sum business
modeling.
It has taken seven
years of work including interviews with leading report writers
on intangibles to iron out the pattern rules of this second maths
for governing organisations. Many of these stimulate interesting
alternative conversations. They repeatedly show how whole waves
of frameworks have been undervalued by management because being
systemic they should not be expected to be justified separately
or by short-term ROI numbers.
During the 1990s
I worked for several years for one of the Big 5 management consultants
and was privy to research of vision interviews of the top 30
leaders of another Big 5 firm. I had always known that the valuation
of corporate brands (my original research area) was non-systemic.
It came as an increasing, if at first tacit shock, to see how
all people relationship systems were being measured in ways that
were counter to the strategy and identity books that emerged
in the 1990s and showed that service, knowledge and network markets
were driven by different value dynamics than the industrial age
where most people served much smaller roles in what differentiated
value.
It is my contention
that if KM is an important subject, then it must bridge many
disciplines and help intervene to change organisations to make
them as humanly valuable as possible. Interestingly, by modeling
intangibles as systems of relationships, the future becomes measurable.
By this I mean that we can see whether a particular organisation
is currently spinning growth or destruction, and KM should be
used to help leaders intervene whenever the latter is compounding.
At the European
Union's knowledgeboard.com, I have been one of the conversation
editors specialising in Emotional Intelligence that was the first
interest group concerned with Human KM as opposed to primarily
ICT. I also edited most conversations on intellectual capital
and networking, and was highly interested in application areas
relating to knowledge society as well as business. Whilst attending
the EU's main conference debriefing on Knowledge Society in 2002
it became clear to me that all the policy capital areas : Human
Capital, Social Capital and Intellectual Capital should be mapped
so they interconnect each other. This may as yet be a controversial
view but I urge people to discuss it energetically.
I believe that few
people have experimented with social networks for as long as
I have. This started as a hobby for me with networking scenarios
featuring in a book in 1984 co-authored with my father Norman
Macrae of The Economist. Its subject was a future history of
the first 40 years of globalisation and networks. And as the
globalisation system became more and more powerful, this could
only spin in one of two ways: that which benefited all of humanity
or that which like Orwell's big brother was controlled by a powerful
few. As it happened 2005, according to our books timeline, was
a crossroads year when man had to decide whether to confront
the greatest risk of differences in incomes and expectations
between rich and poor nations. The scenario seems to be unnervingly
on track. And here anyone who understands network models is devoting
quite a large amount of their pro bono time to identifying the
most open humanitarian ones and making sure they multiply each
other's goodwill and reconciliation reach. I would like to spend
the last couple of days of my session comparing what we know
so far on this with your members many of whom will have diverse
observations to connect to this extraordinary networking exercise.
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