Mr. Rod Welch
rodwelch@pacbell.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
..
Subject:
Teaching SDS to Grow Culture of Knowledge
Multiple Personalities of Users
Dear Rod,
[Responding to your letter
yesterday on January 15, 2003...]
..
Concerning your letter today, shown below, I think the general
problem of knowledge management is that the process of converting
information into knowledge is innate, and so is not familiar to
people in their daily lives...
I think we are on the same page in the sense that what the article calls "core
competencies" always involve conscious attention and understanding. This
includes the understanding that there is nothing "trivial" about the activity
-- that all the details are important.
..
Certainly the unconscious assumption that there are things that "everybody
knows" just by being human interferes with learning anything consciously about
those same issues. The result is that hardly anyone looks at knowledge
management as a subject that has anything to be learned about it. This aligns
with people preferring to do things in "the old, familiar ways" as reported at
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/GLJDY/02/03/01/02/142041.HTM#PQVX ..
I continue to wonder at the thinking that insists that people already know all
about communication, group formation, and such and ignores the multi-billion
dollar industries that exist to teach people precisely those skills.
Astounding.
..
The continuing insistence on trying to get different results by continuing to
do the same things is also disheartening, but something I have come to expect.
..
The question of whether SDS is the way to do KM, what is clear is that
continuing to use the tools currently in use in the same way that are being
used will not achieve different results. *Something* is going to have to change
if anything different is going to be made to happen. The continuing inability
of KM professionals to see this -- I am at a loss for adequate words.
..
Proper design starts with an understanding of what is to be accomplished. It is
not necessary to understand everything that is desired all at once -- that is
the function of incremental development. However, any time we want to add a
feature or accomplish something different, good practice says that we need to
have some idea of what it is we are trying to accomplish.
..
Once a desired outcome has been identified, there are generally many designs
that can work. All the designs that actually work will have features in common
just because they are trying to solve the same problem. Every time we look at a
feature in SDS, that feature has an objective that the feature is intended to
help us realize. There are often several approaches that can work, so we
investigate to see what appears to work best, and build that. Sometimes we get
it close enough to workable on the first try that we are done for a time. At
other times, experience with our implementation indicates that it doesn't work
quite as well as we thought, and that there is another improvement that can be
made. At not time, however, do we implement a feature just for the fun of it --
we do so because there is something we want to be able to do more easily than
we can with the system as it is. The evolution of handling headlines is an
excellent case in point as initially suggested at
.. http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/GLJDY/02/02/10/13/111003.HTM
and the changes that resulted in the current behavior.
..
One aspect of the evolutionary differences between SDS and other attempts at KM
is that SDS evolved through use. Every technology carries some process with it.
Any tool requires some change in behavior to provide its benefits as implied in
the story about the backhoe at
http://www.welchco.com/03/00050/01/09/01/02/00030.HTM#2D4M ..
Imagine someone insisting on getting into the trench to use the backhoe because
"we always do it that way". The idea that KM can "somehow" succeed without any
change in the actions of people is not just mystifying it is crazy.
..
There is an ongoing attempt within the KM ranks to manage knowledge without
ever creating or capturing any. This exercise is doomed to failure.
..
Once you establish the need for a connected chronological record, there are a
number of ways to do it. Once you decide that there needs to be a way to
classify subjects dynamically and you have access to studies on difficulties
with the current approaches, it would make sense to try something new.
..
In software development it has become standard to abandon an approach as
unworkable about once a decade. This is usually because the methods have not
been adopted, and when they are, they are not implemented correctly. The answer
that has been found amounts to declaring the problem solved but the solution
unworkable, and the new methods being so overwhelmingly superior that
everything that has been learned to date has been rendered obsolete. When it is
discovered that most developers won't change the way they work in order to use
the new methods, we start another cycle. Management technology goes through a
similar cycle, with the added problem that most of what passes for management
technology is based on psycho-babble.
..
The unwillingness to do things differently in order to achieve different
outcomes is by no means limited to the field of knowledge management. It
appears to be nearly universal in people. It is certainly a feature of nearly
all management approaches. This is part of why there are entire companies
devoted to trying to help other companies bring about change.
..
Thus, the distinction between "core" and "ring" applications is also a
distinction between areas in which the user has competence and can think with
the material and areas where the user needs to have ongoing education in how to
decide what to do. This is the distinction between augmenting an existing
capability, and encapsulating knowledge that the user doesn't possess.
..
When the abilities that we are trying to augment do not exist, and we develop
augmentation tools, they are rejected, as is noted in the difference between
tax prep programs intended for pros and those intended for casual users.
..
This would indicate that any KM approach should have an educational interface
since it is a "ring" application for nearly all people. However, when we
suggest that people do not understand what is involved in managing knowledge,
we get explosive responses, since this is assumed to be an innate human ability
when it is not. When we attempt to provide augmentation rather than
instruction, we run up against the fact that the skills we are attempting to
augment do not exist, regardless of people's protests to the contrary.
..
When we attempt to augment "good management" for example, we assume that the
techniques of good management are known and understood, and that what the tools
need to do is to provide ways to help the manager do a better job of what he
does already. In most cases, this is not true -- the techniques of "good
management" are in fact not in evidence. Most managers have not training in the
subject, and most of the training that is available is wrong-headed and often
unworkable. Yet when we suggest that there might be something that a manager
could learn that could improve his ability to manage, he takes this statement
of fact as an insult. This is a major dilemma for *any* consultant. To hear the
people with the problem tell the story, there really isn't any problem except
that "there is only one of me" -- if I could just get more people to do what I
do the way I do it, things would be great.
..
The First Law of Consulting:
In spite of what your client may tell you, there is always a problem.
..
The Second Law of Consulting:
No matter how it looks at first, it is always a people problem.
..
The Third Law of Consulting:
Never forget they are paying you by the hour, not by the solution.
..
The Ten Percent Promise Law
Never promise more than ten percent improvement. (If it were possible to
achieve more than ten percent improvement, there must have been a problem,
but there isn't a problem, so ...)
Gerald M. Weinberg, "Secrets of Consulting"
..
The fact that we are attempting to provide support tools for abilities that
most people do not deal with consciously and for which they really need
training, but that they have been convinced is a natural human ability puts us
in the bind of either attempting to teach people what they need to know to use
the tools in the first place and being perceived as insulting, or accepting the
false assumption that people have these skills natively and having them
perceive the tools as a failure because it doesn't permit them to do what they
do not know how to do.
..
So, part of the resistance to SDS has nothing to do with SDS as such, but with
perception that if SDS worked, there would have to be a problem, and that it
would be a people problem, and that means that it would be the users problem --
and the potential user feels insulted and asserts that the attempt to teach
them anything is condescending. It is indeed a dilemma, but SDS and KM are not
alone in being faced with the dilemma.
..
Thanks,
..
Sincerely,
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com
Dynamic Alternatives
P.O. Box 59237
Norwalk, CA 90652
..
Subject:
Multiple Personalities of Users
Gary,
Concerning your letter today, shown below, I think the general
problem of knowledge management is that the process of converting
information into knowledge is innate, and so is not familiar to
people in their daily lives. This is another dilemma. Everybody
is an "expert" at KM because we all do it all the time, but none of
us understand the process, because it occurs on automatic pilot,
so we never deal with the details until we see an SDS record.
Depending on the circumstances, for some, encountering SDS records
is a pleasant surprise shown by recent examples...
.. http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/02/12/28/190923.HTM ..
...and earlier today...
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/03/01/15/182215.HTM ..
For others, who are not seeking help, but feel that SDS is forced upon them,
the same work product is an invasive nuisance because they have no pressure to
perform anything immediate that is aided by the content of the record....
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/02/08/23/164745.HTM#H28F .. ...and, as a result, they yearn for the old fashion, familiar ways, even when
they are professional advocates for change.
..
The result of this binary design (conscious and subconscious processing) when
people are confronted with the mechanics of converting information into
knowledge, they are timid and fearful, like Chip's personality #1 in the
scenario you referenced in your letter; yet, when they pick up the phone, look
at a problem, talk to people, converting information conversion into knowledge
is fast and easy, because that is the way the human mind is wired. It
automatically draws on its experience without any conscious effort, so we have
Chip's personality #2 who gets by very well remembering the gist of information
for fixing cars.
..
The thing that reconciles these split personalities is that while personality
#2 worked well for 2 million years to evolve the human mind, that same mind has
created a world for which it is not well suited. Information overload causes
continual bumbling, even by experts like Chip working on things with which they
feel confident, because the mind is designed to overlook little deviations.
Confident handling of fast moving complex information causes a lot of mistakes
that are overlooked, because we are confident about understanding the big
picture, and because there isn't enough time to remember Aristotle's rule about
the compounding effect of time on little deviations.
..
With SDS, people feel confident and comfortable working with familiar processes
for writing and keeping track of tasks, scheduling and planning. What seems
awkward and makes people ill at ease is getting used to observing the physical
integration of these separate tasks, which are easily, though erroneously,
integrated automatically in the mind.
..
As I say, it is a dilemma.