Six key points to summarise what follows:
Absurd as it may seem right now, in the immediate years to come, decisions of how to invest in the quality of the conversation taking place in an organisation may become among the most important a company’s management will make.
Riding on the back of technological progress, the application of social tools and enabled networks of individuals will focus the sharing of ideas at great speed.
This will build new organisational learning, which will itself in turn accelerate the pace of discontinuous, disruptive, competitive change.
In the face of such change, all business models are ultimately vulnerable. The question is not whether your own will collapse, but when, how and by whom it will ultimately be proved to be fallible. So, how you manage your organisation’s conversation and the human capital it builds and embodies will shape what your business becomes.
It will inform your understanding of what is changing around you, the risks you take and how you respond. And it will determine the nature and extent of the organisational learning and knowledge you either cultivate or forfeit.
How you manage the conversation will also influence who you hire – or who else you engage in it which will then feed back directly into the quality of the organisation’s conversation as a whole because the health, vitality and effectiveness of every node on the network will affect its dynamics and overall learning potential.
Knowledge may be the only resource not depleted but grown through use and sharing.
That knowledge is built by sharing means that social knowledge management will become a primary force used in engineering smarter companies, and the platform on which the most agile and responsive businesses will be sustained. It is a new form of internal communication.
So, here are some principles for thinking on the value of the social knowledge management strategies to be applied in any workplace.
Imagination and tacit workplace knowledge are the source of all business breakthroughs but also under-utilised forces in a majority of organisations. All companies contain much more knowledge than they ever put to use.
The problem is that the dots are rarely joined up well between the decision makers who need the knowledge and those who hold it, especially when they are separated by hierarchy or distance, or by not knowing who is who.
If a strategy fails, it will typically be a result of this gap.
But because it is tacit, not explicit, without exploration, no one knows what knowledge is not being used or what is available.
The relentlessness and unpredictability of change means no business can afford to waste a jot of intelligence because the rate at which companies learn and their employees share and build unique knowledge may be their only way to carve out a sustainable advantage.
In organisations distributed by location, potential innovation creators who once could not identify each other or communicate now can because social technologies can break down the barriers to such collaboration and innovation.
Innovation most commonly results and is built through learning from collisions with others from diverging disciplines and with different worldviews. But beyond the knowledge that their hires can fill a given slot on the organisation chart, most employers don’t know what their people know, who they know, or what else they can bring to their work.
They don’t know who can or will collaborate, and how, or of the full range of ways in which an enhanced contribution can be harnessed.
For their part, employees can’t contribute fully if they are never exposed to better information about the company they work for, or are never engaged effectively in building the strength of the critical success factors on which its prosperity depends.
Contribution and opportunity are stunted when information and knowledge is neither forthcoming nor sought. But the opportunities lie in this critical gap because it is the key to success in confronting change.
No one can predict where important learning will come from, until they get busy on building it. So, how you engage your people and what you ask them to think about will shape what you get back.
This means that what is injected into steering the conversation to provoke new thinking matters too, as nothing is more effective than triggers for learning pulled at the right time and in the right place.
And there is a critical right place: it is where the work is being done and where the face of relentless change is being encountered.
This is a great opportunity for creating an altogether improved, more effective workplace.
As Harvard Business School professor Gary Hamel says in The Future of Management (2007), sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.
Only more minds more sharply focused on the critical issues facing a company will deliver an organisation better equipped to respond to such tumultuous change.
The agile business you want can be built out of the conversation you run, and how that conversation is built for effective social knowledge management will be critical.
But how do you execute? What you need is a plan and a strategy, and that is what I offer.
- All business models will ultimately collapse if they are not managed to adapt to change
- Effective social knowledge management will be the key to continued business agility and competitiveness
- Companies are vulnerable when they don’t know what their employees know and can contribute to improving a business
- Employees are typically engaged less than effectively in strengthening the businesses of their employers
- The health of the conversation that underpins the sharing and building of organisational knowledge must be managed well
- That conversation should be steered and injected with timely materials to stimulate productive and focused new learning
Absurd as it may seem right now, in the immediate years to come, decisions of how to invest in the quality of the conversation taking place in an organisation may become among the most important a company’s management will make.
Riding on the back of technological progress, the application of social tools and enabled networks of individuals will focus the sharing of ideas at great speed.
This will build new organisational learning, which will itself in turn accelerate the pace of discontinuous, disruptive, competitive change.
In the face of such change, all business models are ultimately vulnerable. The question is not whether your own will collapse, but when, how and by whom it will ultimately be proved to be fallible. So, how you manage your organisation’s conversation and the human capital it builds and embodies will shape what your business becomes.
It will inform your understanding of what is changing around you, the risks you take and how you respond. And it will determine the nature and extent of the organisational learning and knowledge you either cultivate or forfeit.
How you manage the conversation will also influence who you hire – or who else you engage in it which will then feed back directly into the quality of the organisation’s conversation as a whole because the health, vitality and effectiveness of every node on the network will affect its dynamics and overall learning potential.
Knowledge may be the only resource not depleted but grown through use and sharing.
That knowledge is built by sharing means that social knowledge management will become a primary force used in engineering smarter companies, and the platform on which the most agile and responsive businesses will be sustained. It is a new form of internal communication.
So, here are some principles for thinking on the value of the social knowledge management strategies to be applied in any workplace.
Imagination and tacit workplace knowledge are the source of all business breakthroughs but also under-utilised forces in a majority of organisations. All companies contain much more knowledge than they ever put to use.
The problem is that the dots are rarely joined up well between the decision makers who need the knowledge and those who hold it, especially when they are separated by hierarchy or distance, or by not knowing who is who.
If a strategy fails, it will typically be a result of this gap.
But because it is tacit, not explicit, without exploration, no one knows what knowledge is not being used or what is available.
The relentlessness and unpredictability of change means no business can afford to waste a jot of intelligence because the rate at which companies learn and their employees share and build unique knowledge may be their only way to carve out a sustainable advantage.
In organisations distributed by location, potential innovation creators who once could not identify each other or communicate now can because social technologies can break down the barriers to such collaboration and innovation.
Innovation most commonly results and is built through learning from collisions with others from diverging disciplines and with different worldviews. But beyond the knowledge that their hires can fill a given slot on the organisation chart, most employers don’t know what their people know, who they know, or what else they can bring to their work.
They don’t know who can or will collaborate, and how, or of the full range of ways in which an enhanced contribution can be harnessed.
For their part, employees can’t contribute fully if they are never exposed to better information about the company they work for, or are never engaged effectively in building the strength of the critical success factors on which its prosperity depends.
Contribution and opportunity are stunted when information and knowledge is neither forthcoming nor sought. But the opportunities lie in this critical gap because it is the key to success in confronting change.
No one can predict where important learning will come from, until they get busy on building it. So, how you engage your people and what you ask them to think about will shape what you get back.
This means that what is injected into steering the conversation to provoke new thinking matters too, as nothing is more effective than triggers for learning pulled at the right time and in the right place.
And there is a critical right place: it is where the work is being done and where the face of relentless change is being encountered.
This is a great opportunity for creating an altogether improved, more effective workplace.
As Harvard Business School professor Gary Hamel says in The Future of Management (2007), sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.
Only more minds more sharply focused on the critical issues facing a company will deliver an organisation better equipped to respond to such tumultuous change.
The agile business you want can be built out of the conversation you run, and how that conversation is built for effective social knowledge management will be critical.
But how do you execute? What you need is a plan and a strategy, and that is what I offer.
