With this book in your hand, you're probably looking for ways to help your organization get smarter by making the most effective use of online conversations. In these pages we write about a basic human drive to share what we know. We reposition that age-old practice at the intersection of two social environments: the modernizing organization and the expanding electronic network.
Your company should know what this book reveals, because in this competitive and downsized economy, you are being forced to make the best use of your current human resource assets. You can't afford the high cost of replacing the knowledge of people you've trained and lost. You must find, harvest, and distribute current and relevant knowledge from a wide variety of trusted human sources in order to make decisions and innovations in today's hyperactive marketplace of things and ideas. Organizations today must change intelligently and constantly to survive. Ongoing, high-quality conversation is a key to making that kind of change possible.
Though online knowledge networks can involve sophisticated technology, this book is not, at its core, about technology; it's more about people and motivation. Though terms like application integration are important to understand in this context, you'll likely find terms like cultural evolution and self-governing systems to be more relevant to the successful adoption of useful online conversation as a productive process within your organization.
Even companies that value their knowledge networks can run into problems applying what they've learned to their business. There is a gap between knowing and doing. Putting conversation to work means bringing the right people with the requisite knowledge together and having their online interaction solve real and immediate problems. To reach that level of practical impact, there must be trust and commitment among the participants in addition to software and connectivity. For your organization, that means leading and fostering the kind of culture that motivates people to share what they know with their coworkers.
If there's a central theme to this book, it's the importance of making the appropriate match between the culture and the technology for any given situation. The cultural needs may pertain to your entire organization, specific teams within your organization, or the constituents who are served by your organization. In our approach, culture is in the driver's seat for selecting and configuring the technology, yet we also emphasize the inevitable influence of technology on the culture that uses it.
Twenty years ago, very few people had seen, much less used, a computer. Now there are hundreds of millions of daily computer users. Today, relatively few people use online conversation as an essential work tool, but we see a future where the skills and practices we describe in this book are common throughout organizations, and where workers are engaged in multiple discussions from their desktops or laptops. In that future, workers will use the Net to share the fresh ideas and experiences that will help guide their companies.
During January and February 2002, the Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey to gauge the involvement of people in online communities.[1] The survey found that 84 percent of Internet users have at one time or another contacted an online group. Referring to these 90 million Americans as Cyber Groupies, the study revealed that half of them claimed that the Internet had helped them connect with people who shared their interests, and that the average Cyber Groupie had contacted four different online groups.
Far from being a cold, lonely, and impersonal electronic medium, the Internet described by the Pew survey is an inhabited communication environment with a vibrant social life. People learn—through the simplicity of the Web interface and from one another—how to find, explore, and sustain social activity on the Net. Many Cyber Groupies engage with their online communities from the workplace. Some of them find their communities within the workplace. Yet these communities and the conversations that go on within them are invisible to most of the companies providing the intranets on which they live. More significantly, these communities are invisible to the leaders of those companies, who need to know more about what their workers know and are doing.
We've seen the end of the first big Internet boom. The dot-com meltdown signaled the end of only the first wave of commercial online innovation and experimentation. But much learning has taken place since the Internet became a commercial medium in 1993. Group communication through the Net is no longer the rare and esoteric practice that it was in the 1980s when we began managing online communities. Thousands of Web sites have since provided chat rooms and message boards. Email among groups of people has become another common meeting place. Instant messaging has become the means through which isolated keyboardists maintain a sense of immediate connection with their online buddies.
Meanwhile organizations—after years of adopting expensive technologies to keep meticulous track of operational numbers and statistics—have recognized that numeric information alone is not sufficient to guide them in today's fast-changing marketplace. Last year's sales figures don't tell them how to change production as new fads, technologies, and competitors suddenly crash into their markets. Millions of records of customer transactions don't inform them of their consumers' thinking after an event like the terrorist attacks on September 11 or a calamitous news story about their industry. Numbers about past performance have fooled many enterprises into thinking they knew what the future would bring.
The Net has speeded up both communication and change in attitudes, opinions, and habits. To anticipate and prepare for the future, organizations must learn more from their employees and from the people on whom they depend— customers, partners, and constituents. Today we need dynamic knowledge— current and constantly updated experience and thinking found only in the agile minds of living human beings and revealed most naturally and completely through human conversations.
This book addresses the modern organization at a point in time when many trial applications for the Net have been abandoned in favor of its powerful role as a communication medium—the purpose for which it was originally designed. We now have a significant percentage of consumers—both inside and outside of the organization—using the Net to connect and converse with others. Organizations are desperately seeking a competitive edge in a world defined by unexpected change, increasingly decentralized leadership and the instant interconnectivity of hundreds of millions. The consumer is far more informed than in the pre-Web days, and now expects to be able to communicate directly—and honestly—with the companies that make the products (s)he buys. We wrote this book now to teach organizations how to engage in the conversations that can make them integral parts of this new, expanding, and uncontrollable marketplace.
Chief executives make and approve strategy, and knowledge networking is a strategic tool. This book may be too instructional for executive reading matter, but its practical lessons should make its conceptual message more palatable to those who lead organizations.
It used to be said that executives would be the last ones to begin using email because they relied on secretaries to do all of their typing. They may have learned to type since then, but it's still true that the typical executive is the most distanced employee from the online interaction that takes place among the tiers of workers who long ago adopted email to help coordinate their projects and tasks. As remnants from the hierarchical model of organizations, those tiers form impenetrable firewalls between the executives and the creative conversations that hold the potential of transforming their organizations.
The Net is the great equalizer. It undermines hierarchies because networks don't recognize artificial separations between organizational layers. This has become common knowledge, but just as outdated legacy computer systems prevent many companies from progressing to the next level of technical integration, legacy organization charts keep many companies from realizing their networked potential. Executives should read this book to get a refresher on the philosophy of the network revolution, but also to get a better understanding of the different form of leadership that is necessary to keep their organizations in sync with that ongoing revolution. Leaders must understand the medium of online conversation to do a good job of leading people to use it well. We suspect that most company leaders still lack that understanding.
Managers, like executives, are leaders, but in being closer to the workers and their specific responsibilities, their role definitions are changing due to the self-organizing influence of the Net. Because managers direct the activities of working groups, they, too, need to understand the capabilities of the technology to support conversations so that they can begin to plan and lead their departments and teams within the emerging online meeting place. Managers should be regular participants in online forums for planning, innovation and knowledge sharing, and need to stay current with existing work-related online discussions among the people they supervise. Managers who truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of using online conversation as a working tool will get the most out of it.
It's more likely that workers and professionals have already begun to use the available online communications media to exchange mission critical information about their jobs or projects, but this book is for them, too. For although leadership from the top of the organization is a necessity for changing a culture to one that values creative conversation, the best conversations and best ideas are most likely to bubble up from the bottom of the organizational chart, where the actual work gets done and the company interfaces most directly with its customers. We hope this book inspires the spontaneous formation of online communities that can solve immediate problems and inspire the widespread use of online knowledge networks within receptive organizations.
We have spent a combined 30 years in the practice of online community—using the technology of networks to help people locate and engage with groups that bring them personal and professional support, useful ideas and trusted knowledge. With keyboards and words as their main tools for communication, members of these communities interact for mutual benefit; they get to know one another, learn from one another, and collaborate to achieve shared goals. They cannot be easily steered or controlled, for just as soon as you attempt to direct their activities, they are likely to cease their activity.
We've observed that as people become more familiar with one another, trust grows and the transfer of relevant knowledge between them becomes easier and more efficient. Learning begets more learning; people not only learn who knows what, they learn the most effective techniques for getting their fellow members to reveal and share what they know. We have found ourselves observing the organic formation and change that happens when people are given access to tools for building conversational relationships on the Net, and we've often described the experience as like watching ant farms.
In his new book, Emergence[2], Steven Johnson—a leading innovator in the use of the Web as a collaborative publishing medium—uses the behavior of ants to illustrate the principle of self-organizing systems. Johnson describes ant colonies as "having this miraculous ability to pull off complex engineering feats or resource management feats without an actual leadership dictating what any ants should be doing at any time."[3] Ants get all this done by following simple local rules through which, Johnson says in an interview, "the intelligence of the colony comes into being."
In our earliest experience with online community at the WELL, one of the groundbreaking experiments in group conversation among home-based personal computer users, we imposed only a few very simple rules, otherwise providing the members with access to the discussion tools to make with them what they would. Among other things, they built a knowledge-sharing community, broken down into hundreds of separate topic areas formed around personalities, expertise and relationships. We got to spend most of our time as system managers keeping the technology functioning, providing support for new members and paying the bills. The content and the database of conversations was created and owned by the members—the knowledge sources and the knowledge seekers who swapped roles constantly.
The traditional business world is gradually beginning to release control like we did, allowing the emergence of new culture, new social practices and new ways of organizing from the bottom up. Flattening the hierarchy and empowering the collaborative workplace is threatening to the traditional role of leadership and it presents a prospect of the future that is new and untried. Few executives, no matter how open-minded, want to follow the model of ant colonies in changing the cultures of their companies. But the Net represents the new collaborative environment, and in networks these ant-like organizing effects not only work well, they are natural social behaviors and thus are difficult to suppress.
The Net, looked at as a whole, is a demonstration of emergent behaviors. Most of the content on the Web has been created outside of any overall plan or leadership mandate. Most of the communities have been formed because there was an opportunity and need, rather than a directive from on high. Literally billions of Web pages have been produced based on the simple rules of HTML and Internet software.
To the modern organization, the most valuable thing about emergent behavior is its ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. A look back at the previous decade—or even the past year—should provide sufficient evidence that we live in times of ever-changing circumstances. The need to adapt constantly is upon every organization that hopes to survive. The goal going into the twenty-first century is not so much to be a dominant organization, but to be a sustainable organization.
Ants don't follow leaders, nor do they build and rely on projections for the future. They communicate intensively, react to situations, and adapt constantly as they build their colonies, gather and store their food and deal effectively with local disasters like rain and having large critters stomp on their front doors. For organizations to quickly adapt to sudden downturns in the market, terrorist attacks and war, oil embargoes and transportation disruptions, their people must develop the skills and habits to communicate fluently and effectively. Accomplishing that will take practice and cultural support as we describe in this book.
The Oxford English Dictionary claims that the roots of the modern English word knowledge are in Old English terms meaning "confession" and "to play, give, move about." Knowledge would seem to come from inside and to be restless at the same time. This fits our experience with knowledge sharing, where people reveal what they hold in their minds within a social atmosphere that is informal, trusting, and generous.
As we managed online communities and taught clients how to implement them in business settings during the nineties, we repeatedly encountered references to the term knowledge management. Businesses first practiced this concept by keeping better records of their transactions and quantifiable operations so that less "knowledge" was lost to the organization. As we looked into the practice, we learned that what was originally called knowledge was more accurately redefined as information because it had lost its association with any human experience. We also found that many had begun to question anyone's ability to manage knowledge, it being the experiential content of the human mind. By the end of the year 2000, knowledge management had evolved into a quest for more effective access to tacit knowledge—the experiential human understanding that didn't lend itself to quantification or to management.
Organizations stand to lose tacit knowledge whenever an employee leaves the company or when an employee has no means or motivation to reveal what (s)he knows to others. We had seen years of voluntary and enthusiastic exchange of tacit knowledge in the online communities we managed, and recognized the importance and relevance of what we had learned about groups in conversation through the Net—that tacit knowledge is shared readily where there is trust and the recognition of mutual benefit in the exchange.
As millions of people have learned how to access and use the Web, they have realized its power as a communications channel between them and their families, associates, and fellow enthusiasts in a myriad of hobbies and interests. Such communications account for more of their time online than any other pursuit, including information searches and shopping. Interpersonal informal communication has proven to be the most compelling use—the "killer app"—of the Net.
In this book, we apply the best practices of online conversation to the needs for effective knowledge exchange, which forward-looking organizations now recognize as their most compelling application of electronic networking tools. In the following chapters we describe how the mechanistic and hierarchical models of business operation and organization are being transformed into more decentralized and as some describe it, "messy" models composed of independent links between individuals and their self-organizing groups. And as we lead you through these descriptions, we provide you with proven ideas, suggestions, and examples for transforming your team, your department, your organization into one that is smart, alert, and ready to deal with the challenges of these exciting and unpredictable times.
The drive to share what we know is as old as humankind itself, but using the Net to share knowledge for the good of organizations is a new concept. On a grassroots level it is happening now, and is just beginning to find support and understanding from the leaders of organizations. The first two chapters of Part 1 provide historical and organizational background that may help you recognize and deal with some of the most entrenched sources of resistance and hesitancy to change in your company. Chapter 3 describes how the building of knowledge networks should guide the formulation of appropriate business strategy for this tumultuous age.
Part 2 explores the two legs of online knowledge networking: culture and technology. Because technology is necessary to create the online environment, its influence cannot be separated from the resulting culture. Chapter 4 looks at the role of the information technology department (IT) in building and maintaining the technical platform for the knowledge network, and the ideal working relationship between the network and the technicians who are counted on to fix it, improve it and keep it available. We examine the needs of a knowledge sharing culture—for trust, leadership, and mutual rewards—and then describe the challenges you may face in bringing your established organizational culture online. The final chapter in this section matches specific goals, styles, and missions of knowledge networks with the online communications technologies that best fit them.
Part 3 provides true-life examples, best practices, and wise suggestions for implementing knowledge networks to fit different circumstances, now and in the near future. We begin by presenting a variety of solutions for initiating and supporting conversations within the organization—from the spontaneous gatherings of fellow specialists to the broad-based provision of company-wide online discussion systems. Then we move to the practice of conversing with external stakeholders—customers, consumers, partners, and constituents. The increasing sophistication of consumers is driving companies to catch up to them in online conversation skills in order to engage with them in mutually meaningful conversation. The relationship between empowered consumer and the attentive company is leading the evolution of the marketplace. We wrap up the book with educated musings on the future knowledge networks and online knowledge sharing, noting that the future is already here, but is being practiced by very few organizations.
The following paragraphs, moving from history toward the future, describe the contents of the chapters of this book.
- Chapter 1: "Knowledge, History, and the Industrial Organization."
Human history is filled with conversation and knowledge sharing. Though communication was much slower in the past than it is today, we got to where we are now in terms of technology, culture, economy, and government through the exchange and distribution of new ideas. This chapter establishes our heritage as natural collaborators where common goals are recognized. It also illustrates how the medium—whether oral tales, clay tablets, papyrus, or parchment sheets, or the wonder of the printed page— affects the spread of knowledge and its influence on society. Until the dawn of the industrial age, most people passed along their experiential working knowledge personally, to apprentices and coworkers. The transition to the assembly line reduced the number of workers whose skills could be defined as knowledge and introduced the idea of the worker as a cog in a machine. We are still dealing with this mechanistic model of the organization and its workers, which is why many companies have failed to recognize the importance of worker knowledge.
- Chapter 2: "Using the Net to Share What People Know."
This chapter looks at the evolution of modern management theories, spanning the transition from worker-as-cog to worker as holder of key knowledge. Moving from Industrial Age mentality to Information Age mentality, the accompanying transformation of management philosophy has been jolted by the widespread adoption of the Internet and the Web. Information management has become a necessity and, as the tools and connectivity have advanced, the concept of knowledge networking has been born. Although industrialization altered the definitions of "the worker" and of "the job," it could not extinguish the natural tendency to share with others what we know. With the rise of mass markets, sellers became distanced from the buyers, but the Net has reintroduced the ability for sellers and buyers to connect and converse. It has also provided more convenient means than was ever possible before for sharing knowledge among groups.
- Chapter 3: "Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network."
In formulating strategies for the foreseeable future, organizations must accept that change and surprise may be their most reliable guiding stars. Planning must therefore include the distinct possibility of sudden stops and abrupt changes in direction. Knowledge networks as adaptive social systems are not only appropriate elements in today's strategic planning, they are valuable contributors to such planning because they support the continuing exchanges of ideas, rumors, and circulating information that helps organizations prepare and brace themselves for changes that might otherwise blindside them. Incorporating knowledge networks into the company's strategic future requires leadership that understands how such networks function, for any top-down design of what is basically a bottom-up activity can render it dysfunctional. Likewise, in designing the platform for knowledge networking, the actual users are the best judges of utility and convenience. We revisit many of these points in the chapter about internal knowledge exchange.
- Chapter 4, "The Role of IT in the Effective Knowledge Network."
The IT manager and the IT department have important roles in supporting dynamic, self-guided knowledge networks though many people have "rolled their own" using basic email. That fact points out the need for simplicity in choosing and implementing technology. While it is tempting to think in terms of choosing or designing software that will do more work and thereby increase human productivity, there are important reasons for at least beginning with the simplest tools that will enable measurable improvement in knowledge exchange. One reason is cost. Another is in facilitating the building of a good working relationship between the IT department and the people looking to build the online knowledge network. Such collaboration is crucial if the knowledge network is going to be able to incrementally improve its working environment. The more people converse, the more prone they are to discover new ideas for making their conversations richer—whether those ideas demand the addition of new technical features or whole new technical platforms. The role of IT should be to aid in tool selection, initial installation, and maintenance and the integration of relevant information applications within the company that will support the cultivation of knowledge.
- Chapter 5: "Fostering Knowledge-Sharing Culture."
Conversational knowledge sharing can (and will) only take place in a supportive social atmosphere. Such a persistent environment is what we call a "culture." The knowledge network exists, first, within the organization's greater culture, yet it may grow out of a more local subculture—that of an area of expertise or a functional division within the organization. It will probably develop an even more unique subculture once it goes online. An online knowledge sharing culture requires certain conditions and nutrients just as an orchid can only grow within certain ranges of temperature, humidity, and soil conditions. Yet, unlike an orchid, an online knowledge network can adapt to changing conditions through its conversations and technology. So we describe method that can be used to provide ideal conditions for the germination and early growth of the knowledge network inside of your organization. These conditions include tolerance for diversity, incentives for sharing what people know and for learning the skills necessary to do that sharing, and leadership that makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the creative energy of employees is valued.
- Chapter 6: "Taking Culture Online."
The online world is different from the world of physical presence. People communicate differently and must compensate for what the virtual meeting place cannot provide in the way of contact and the subtleties of facial expression and tone of voice. Though we have technologies through which people can meet via video, this is very much the exception rather than the rule of online community activity. This chapter introduces the relationship between people and the interfaces that allow them to practice knowledge sharing in Cyberspace. Technical choices and design are important to the flow of information between people. They can block or inhibit that flow just as easily as they can make it possible or even improve it. Unnecessary complexity is always to be avoided. Change for the sake of change is often counterproductive. Interfaces with which a culture is already comfortable should be leveraged. This chapter will be full of cautions and descriptions of technical pitfalls.
- Chapter 7: "Choosing and Using Technology."
The choice of technologies for supporting online conversation fall into several buckets: chat, instant messaging, message boards and broadband voice and video. The most important companion technologies involve content management and publishing. The frameworks for presenting these tools and content are intranets and the more specifically purposed portals. Our approach for recommending various combinations of these tools it to describe the groups and purposes for which they will be used. Small teams with a single project may be best served by simple email, while department-level collaboration may require the flexibility of a full-blown portal. Features that permit each participant to customize their use of an interface can be an attraction or a distraction, depending on the importance of the conversation and its longevity. There are many factors to consider in choosing technology, but initial simplicity, flexibility of design, and the ability to incrementally expand in power and features are the characteristics that describe every community's ideal knowledge sharing environment.
- Chapter 8: "Initiating and Supporting Internal Conversation."
This how-to chapter describes a process of analyzing what you've got in terms of knowledge needs, culture, and existing internal communities, and then clearly stating your goals. From that point, you can choose from the available options to design the most appropriate social and technical structure. We recommend practices based on our experience and those of other experts in the fields of knowledge networking and online community. Our recommendations will provide you with some shortcuts to effective internal conversation, but you may find the most value in our warnings against certain social or technical pitfalls that can doom the knowledge network before it can reach cruising speed. Some organizational prerequisites need to be in place if your company is to have a chance of learning from its own workers. And different techniques for sharing knowledge can be applied under different social or work-related circumstances, storytelling, and conversation facilitation being two of them. We describe three different models of knowledge networking communities: spontaneous, strategic, and transitory, each requiring different approaches to management and technical support.
- Chapter 9: "Conversing with External Stakeholders."
Perhaps the greatest difference between today's organization and that of a few years ago is the increased dependence on the external stakeholder that is the result of the Net. Because those stakeholders—consumers, customers, business partners, supporters, and investors—can now communicate so easily and repeatedly through email and the Web, they are more informed and willing to share what they know about your organization or your competition. The conversations about you are probably already happening, and your mission—should you decide to accept it—is to be a part of at least some of those conversations. The choice of meeting ground is not yours to make, though some pioneering companies have successfully invited consumers to join them on their home sites to help them understand the needs and preferences of customers. We describe the differences in expectations between business-to-customer (B2C) conversations and business-to-business (B2B) conversations, and how your organization can best initiate and motivate them. Organizations are looking for cost-effective ways to gain access to the vital tacit knowledge contained in the interests, experiences and opinions of their Web-connected stakeholders. Online conversation is an effective route to that knowledge.
- Chapter 10, "The Path Ahead."
Trends are at work and taking hold in large companies that can afford to experiment in new practices. Some of these involve conversational knowledge networks and some of what they discover and implement on a larger scale will be shared and adopted by smaller companies as reports of their success, best practices and value circulate. Some of the changes that will stimulate the formation of knowledge-sharing communities are technical, but most are cultural. Technologies that allow smoother integration of software applications will provide more powerful knowledge-sharing environments. The conversion of more CEOs to belief in the less-controlled, decentralized organization will open the doors to more creative participation by workers and consumers. Changes and enhancements to traditional accounting practices will assign value to collaboration and innovative conversation that is not there now. Whatever your organization does today to make its knowledge sharing more effective through the Net is only preparation for its reaching the status of a sustainable organization.
As all books must be, this is a snapshot of what the field of conversational knowledge networking is like as of the beginning of the year 2002. This book is accompanied by a companion Web site, where additional information and ideas are being posted to update readers and interested Web surfers on this changing field. To access this information, go to www.wiley.com/compbooks/figallo.
Included on the site are templates for evaluating the support of knowledge sharing in an organization, a survey for identifying the right starting point for a knowledge networking initiative, a checklist for framing a strategy that includes knowledge networking, a short training course for community managers and facilitators, links to relevant software tools, and a discussion board where readers can interact with us and with one another.