Cynefin, Knowledge Spirals and Bonfires

A recent post by Thomas Vander Wal reminded me I needed to share some of the thinking I've been doing over the last few months. In On Fire with Social Progressions Thomas describes the social flows of information from idea through to formal outcome. In this post he uses a neat analogy of a growing fire to describe this progression. It all starts with an individual creating a spark, an idea, that grows into a campfire as a group gather round and add their perspectives. This campfire builds into a bonfire as more and more contribute to the original idea and finally becomes a beacon (Thomas uses torch holder), a formal full rounded piece of information that people can navigate by. This is a great visual analogy and reminded me of an aspect of the Cynefin framework and the description of 'The natural flow of knowledge' in Complex acts of knowing: Paradox and descriptive self-awareness by Dave Snowden. The beauty of the Cynefin framework is the simple way it breaks down and describes knowledge space which can best be describe by Dave Snowden:



In "Complex acts of knowing" Dave illustrates how ideas start in the the complex domain and around these communities naturally form which through the process of formalisation grow into communities of practice within the knowable domain. Knowledge is aggregated and ideas built upon as members of the community ask new questions of the chaotic domain, gain new insights in the complicated domain and test and analyse them in the knowable domain. At some point a limited amount of codified knowledge can be separated out from the community and moved into the known domain.
I think you can easily see the similarities between Thomas's "fire" analogy and the knowledge spiral aspect of the Cynefin framework. Now while Thomas's "fire" analogy describes the social flows of information from idea through to formal outcome the Cynefin framework takes this idea much further and provides a way to explore the wider concept of knowledge space. Having introduced the idea of the knowledge spiral and how it applies to the Cynefin framework the next step will be to explore the requirements of the domains and how enterprise 2.0 tools align to them.

As Jessica says "Advertise yourself"

The last quarter has been a very rewarding time for the team who developed OnePoint, the innovative combination of OneNote and SharePoint, as we picked up three awards for this work. These were the Royal Society of Chemistry Teamwork in Innovation Award 2010, Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Award 2010 and KMUK 2010 Best KM initiative or implementation in a corporate enterprise. As a consequence of this external validation the internal interest in this solution has step up another notch. Further more we have just heard that the executive leadership team on the board are about to adopt OnePoint. Not bad, we have gone from the research bench in Sandwich to the boradroom in New York!

Our DNA

Over the last 3 years I have been involved in numerous experiments with enterprise 2.0 tools, some have been successful and some not so. Out of these experiments has come a realisation that a prerequisite of success is to ensure you create the right environment for collaboration to flourish. I haven come to think of these as a set of principles that define the core architecture of collaboration. These principles apply equally to the technology and the culture. It is my experience that adoption of these principles is required if a culture of collaboration and openness is to develop. The four core principles are:

1. Freedom - The easiest way to prevent collaboration from occurring is to impose overly burdensome control around how colleagues work. If collaboration is to flourish we need to trust colleagues and not impose rigid workflows, inappropriate approval processes (moderation), restriction on who can collaborate with whom (association) and have an open attitude towards sharing information.
2. Emergence - No two collaborations are the same, each team/group will have different requirements and will develop different working practices. Given this then we need to allow patterns and structures to emerge as collaborations develop. This is not to say we should not stimulate behaviors we want or share experiences but rather we should accept this and recognise that we need to avoid a 'One size fits all' approach.
3. Clarity of Purpose - Contextualising tools for colleagues work processes is critical. Without a clear explination as to how and when to use new tools colleagues become confused and revert back to there default methods of working. The lack of consistent advice around how and when to use these tools inevitably leads to adoption of Outlook for information management, fragmented silos of project data and a lack of any real knowledge management processes.
4. Ease of Use - Collaboration is about enabling conversations between people. It is not about technology. Therefore, it is critical that technology does not get in the way of collaboration. If we are to enable a culture of collaboration we must ensure that colleagues find the tools are intuitive and require minimal training.

Over the next few post I will expand upon each of these principles.

Best use of 20 minutes

Lawrence Lessig is a hero of mine. He is a libertarian and campaigns for reform of copyright, among many other things, which he argues is being used to stifle our cultural creativity. Watch the video below, probably the best use of 20 minutes of your time today, and think about this topic but in terms of attitude to information sharing within your company.



A couple of years ago I made a series of post to an internal blog on the need for a Freedom of Information policy within the company. Now this as you might expect was slightly controversial but it did get a conversation started. The kernel of the argument was that we should change our mindset from one where the default position was to lock down access to one where the default position was to leave access open. Note this was not forcing anyone to make things open but rather change the default settings on systems such that you had to actively make the choice to lock access down rather than being asked who should have access. This may seem like a minor change but it's impact has been huge and has contributed to the development of an open culture where sharing is the norm. Engendering this change has been central to the success of our effort to adopt enterprise 2.0 tools.

Cynefin - Sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0

Yesterday while nursing my daughter, bad cold/little sleep, I had the time to catch up on some reading I'd been putting off. One of the papers 'Complex acts of knowing: Paradox and descriptive self-awareness' by Dave Snowden of Cognative Edge was a really gem. I've been struggling for a while with contextualising how 'knowledge' is created along with the tools, process and people involved in it's creation. The paper draws on anthropology and complex adaptive systems theory to illustrate how our behaviours under different conditions affect how we make decisions. Essentially the model consists of a 4 box with unstructured vs structured on the x-axis and low vs high abstraction on the y-axis. This gives us four boxes, starting in the bottom left and moving clockwise we have:

Chaos - here we need to impose order
Complex - here we look for patterns
Knowable - here we refine and analysis
Known - here we learn/teach

Here is a simple video explanation of the Cynefin framework:

This framework has been predominately used in the arena of Sensemaking but Jim McGee has highlighted the close relationship between this discipline and enterprise 2.0 tools "... I would suggest .... those promoting Enterprise 2.0 technologies to investigate the sensemaking planning techniques and practices and map points where the technologies enable, simplify, or improve the techniques." Ok that is what I'm going to do, I'll share my findings here.

Is love too strong a word?

Can you suggest a better tagline?

A couple of OnePoint case studies

We have just got a couple of case studies published around our use of OnePoint, a combination of OneNote & SharePoint, and the value we are seeing from it.

The first will be published in Drug Discovery Today and you can read the pre-print here.

‘OnePoint’ – combining OneNote and SharePoint to facilitate knowledge transfer

The identification and development of novel drugs requires a multidisciplinary team of individuals whose membership changes during the lifecycle of a project. Incomplete knowledge transfer across this team can be a barrier to effective decision-making and efficient drug discovery. We have deployed a new infrastructure supporting information storage and distribution within small teams using Microsoft's SharePoint™ server technology in conjunction with the desktop application OneNote™. This delivers a user-friendly collaborative workspace that is fast, flexible and carries a low training burden. Demand from drug project teams for this ‘solution’ has now resulted in site-wide deployment to over 500 people across research.

The second case study, available here, was done in collaboration with Microsoft. In this case Microsoft also produced a video, see below, which really brings OnePoint to life (need Silverlight installed to view).

Pfizer Boosts Efficiency by 15 Percent with Easy to Use, Shared Note-Taking Program

For the past 150 years, Pfizer has pioneered the development of some of the industry’s most innovative pharmaceutical products. In 2007, Pfizer applied this “out of the box” thinking to a pilot program designed to enhance efficiency and knowledge management across project teams, and potentially speed time-to-market for new products. The pilot brought together the simple, intuitive user interface of the Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2007 note-taking program with the robust document management technology of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. As a result, pilot participants reported a significant decrease in the number of e-mail messages they send each day, and one group reported a 15 percent increase in efficiency. Overall, the 600 participants reported a 2 percent time savings per week, which represents a cost savings of approximately U.S.$2.25 million.