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Archive for March, 2007

Informal Learning – Communities of Practice

March 21st, 2007
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Informal knowledge transfer

As the importance of informal knowledge transfer grows, organizations are looking to communities of practice (CoPs) as a solution. A community of practice, according to Wikipedia.com, refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest or problem "collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations."

CoPs build on existing formal content tools, such as portals, learning management systems, document management, content management, and knowledge management, as well as team and productivity tools. CoPs enable organizations to add a new casual dimension to their learning cultures.

This informal approach to learning offers a way for workers to not only consult learning materials from the company, but also combine that information with learning materials they create and share through question and answer forums and professional networking opportunities in which peers, mentors, and subject matter experts solve problems.

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Story Telling and Tacit Knowledge

March 3rd, 2007
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Anecdote: One of the big misunderstandings about stories and tacit knowledge  Annotated

  • misunderstanding storytelling
     - post by brentmack

One of the big misunderstandings about stories and tacit knowledge
 

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge, Most Significant Change, Narrative, Sensemaking, Storytelling.

People have heard that storytelling is great for dealing with tacit knowledge. They say things like, “If we could only capture our stories we could then capture our organisation’s tacit knowledge.”

This is the big mistake! Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.

In practice, this means creating spaces for stories to be told and listened to. We do it in a bunch of different ways depending on the needs and objectives of our clients.

For example, if we are helping tackle complex issues such as trust, leadership, culture change, we would create the space in sensemaking workshops.

If we need to evaluate the impact of difficult to measure initiatives we create the space using Most Significant Change and the selection workshops.

NASA creates this space for staff to listen to and tell stories in their monthly project management seminars where PMs discuss the stories collected in the their monthly newsletter, ASK.

Everyone is busy and no one will give up their valuable time to listen and tell stories. But they will allocate time to evaluate a project, tackle a complex problem or learn lessons from their colleagues.

The stories don’t contain magical solutions that we can capture, dissect and unleash. Rather they provide a language of engagement, of learning and a way to transfer what is impossible to write down and store in any database.

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