Bookmarking inspirations
Oprah, with a simple reference, can propel a book onto the NY Times bestseller list. Paris Hilton, with no traditional talent to speak of, can install into the common dialect of generation the phrase “that’s hot”. There is no doubt that these and others who are plugged into traditional media outlets strongly influence what’s hot and what’s not.
There are, however, many hot trends that strongly and stealthfully establish themselves without the aid of traditional media sources. Malcolm Gladwell begins his book, The Tipping Point, with a recount of the resurgence of Hush Puppies, a popular shoe brand of the late ‘50s. In the mid ‘90s, a small group of no-name, club-going kids in Soho began sporting Hush Puppies and somehow started a “social epidemic” with the classic $30 shoe quickly making frequent appearances in hip Manhattan bars and fashion runways. Within a year, the once forgotten shoe was sold in department stores nationwide, becoming a staple in wardrobes across the country once again. Throughout his book, Gladwell explores a number of contagious trends that seem to stem from small, unusually informed, and faceless groups of people who are influential through interpersonal means. Gladwell contends that finding and gaining insights from these “influentials” can quickly drive and maintain a brand’s “cool factor”. Airwalk, for example, was extremely successful at tapping influentials in the skateboard community to transform what was counterculturally “rad” to what was mainstreamly cool.
The ability for underground ideas or trends to take hold may not be the product of influentials themselves, as Gladwell asserts, but, rather, the interconnectivity of those looking to be influenced. Recently Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, conducted experiments in social contagion by performing thousands of computer simulations of fictitious populations. In the simulations he and his colleague, Peter Dodds, manipulated variables related to one’s ability to influence others and one’s tendency to be influenced. The simulations showed that influential characteristics had far less impact than had been believed and, in fact, didn’t seem to be required at all. The widespread transmission of influence through networks was not reliant on a few influential people but, rather, a critical mass of influenced people. In contrast to the belief that there is a small, uniquely influential group of people responsible for creating pandemic trends, Watts and Dodds’s research suggests that influence is not driven by the influentials, but by the influenced–turning the focus away from recruiting those with influential traits to helping ordinary people reach and influence others just like them.
This outreach is happening right now on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine. These in addition to others allow anyone to troll the online universe for ideas, news, and commentary and attach tags and catchy descriptions to their online finds. As bookmarked pages receive votes of approval by fellow community members, their influence rises to the front page of the social networks. It is these front pages that propagate a global cascade as viral word of mouth spreads beyond the bookmarking sites to mainstream outlets. The next time you are made aware of a “buzzy” website, an unusual take on the news, or a funny video clip, chances are you owe your awareness to communities of diversely ordinary people interested in influencing and, more importantly, being influenced.
A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed just how powerfully influential these communities have become. The WSJ found that the substantial number of bookmarking submissions originate from a low percent of users. For example, of Digg’s 900,000 registered users, 30 were responsible for nearly one-third of the posts that made it to the front page of the site. This small group of users has become influentially popular by consistently finding interesting and relevant content. Consequently, their bookmarks are monitored by a large number of community members and are more likely to receive the numerous votes of approval needed to catapult their finds to the front page. As Gladwell proposes in his book, the influentials are faceless and small in number, but as Watts and Dodds suggest, the network effects of those influenced drives the influence, rather than the personal characteristics of those influencing. In fact, this small group of influentials is surprisingly ordinary. Some of the most influential people cited in the WSJ article include:
• Pamela Drew – a mother of three in New York
• Henry Wang – a high-school senior and varsity tennis player outside Chicago
• Cliff Worthington – a 45-year-old English Teacher in Osaka Japan
• Jeff Hoard – a 25-year-old worker in a shipping warehouse in British Columbia
• Adam Fuhrer – a 12-year-old hockey fan in Toronto
• Elise Bauer – A marketing consultant in California
Companies have long struggled to harness the knowledge found within their walls. Their pursuit is to ultimately gain a competitive advantage by bringing awareness to expertise and influential ideas. Excluding technical knowledge banks, like Xerox’s Eureka system, which has had great success, efforts in this area have lead to clumsy, often unpopulated repositories with disappointing returns.With each passing day, our world becomes flatter as the universe of knowledge and ideas becomes evermore entwined.
If the struggle is to stay on the wave of innovation through knowledge management, why do we so often limit our efforts to harvesting an internal landscape? The vast majority of our workforce is being defined as knowledge workers as the information age continues to mature. Productive time is increasingly used to troll for new ideas, and surely workers are looking beyond internally limiting and disappointing knowledge management systems for inspiration.
It’s time to open the shutters and leverage each worker’s knowledge collection effort by utilizing social bookmark technologies–allowing employees to bookmark both internet and intranet inspirations. We should limit our tireless efforts of formally wrestling knowledge from the minds of employees and, rather, provide them tools to tag and catalogue the world of found anecdotes and ideas, allowing their influences to percolate to the top of an organization’s strategic list–separating what’s hot from what’s not.
The blind leading the deaf
Platitudes like “Be the most competitive enterprise”, “Provide customers with the best information to make the buying decisions!”, and “Unlock shareholder value!” are numbing to the ears. Yet sweeping strategy statements like these are often swiftly attached to an organization’s cultural facade–deploying “graffiti artists” to tag everything from interoffice memos to employee’s marquee screensavers–often with the expectation that if touted loud enough, an organization will realize the embodiment of the slogans.
These bumper sticker goals leave employees directionless or even cynical. Why then are executives swept off their feet, glowing with more passion than on their wedding night, when proclaiming these found keys to success? It’s primarily because the messenger has been immersed in the logic and conversations underlining the message for so long that when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of knowledge in their minds. Frontline employees, however, are not privy to the underlining meaning and consequently hear only slick, opaque phrases that slide in one ear and out the other.
Ultimately, executives touting such messages are blinded, cursed by their knowledge, while the audience is deaf to the passion and depth of the message given. As a result, statements meant to ignite a strategic path all too often fall on deaf ears, only to become meaningless slogans.
A recent Harvard Business Review article (December 2006) addresses the curse of knowledge and the difficulties it poses in uniting employees behind an organization’s goals. The article points to a study conducted by Elizabeth Newton, a graduate student at Stanford University. The study was comprised of a game that assigned people one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener”. The goal was to see if the listener could determine what well-known song the tapper was rhythmically playing on a table. By the end of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out, but surprisingly only three (2.5%) were guessed correctly.
I tried this experiment with my colleague, John Whittlesey, who, I should note, is a talented opera singer with very well tuned ear. I first tried the “Happy Birthday” song thinking for sure John would pick it up right away. I quickly arrived at the end of my composition and found a confused face staring back at me…hmmm maybe he wasn’t familiar with that one. So I tried another familiar tune and started to jam to the “Flintstones” theme song. Well, it didn’t take more than a glance to see this wasn’t going to work either. It didn’t take any encouragement on my part to find that the tables had turned. John quickly started to orchestrate, with gusto, a wonderful melody of noise. After its completion, I came to find out that it was the “Flintstones” theme song. Why on earth didn’t I recognize a song my ears should have been turned to, having just attempted it myself?
The article uses the study to illustrate what it calls the curse of knowledge; that is, it is impossible for the knowledge base (the tapper) to avoid understanding all of the underlining meaning supporting the knowledge shared (to avoid hearing the tune he’s performing). While the learner (the listener), struggles to decipher the knowledge that seems to be presented with such ease (witnesses a bizarre ritual set to a cacophony of noise that seems to effortlessly entertain the musician) and risks not internalizing the message, but instead relegating it in their mind as a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the organizations lobby.
Though the study means to demonstrate the deafening effect of information imbalance, I don’t believe it completely explains why I was not able to recognize John’s rendition of the “Flintstones” theme song. There was little information imbalance other than perhaps the difference in musical ability; I was familiar with the song, still in my mind from tapping it out moments prior, and familiar with the rules of the game, yet I missed the distinguishing notes all together. There was clearly a disconnect between my external and internal ear. Had I been given the task to orchestrate the “Flintstones” theme song, I would have no problem forming the song accurately in my mind. But if it were necessary to be taken to task to experience first hand, any knowledge shared (which success in the experiment seems to require), then we would still be running around in the buck, ducking from the thunder gods in the sky. So how have we been able skirt the information imbalances that exist between any two people and share knowledge over the millennium? It has been through the use of stories, analogies, anecdotes, and visual cues that have provided the concrete patterns on which to adapt one reality to the next.
In his book “Winning“, Jack Welch states that mission statements should be so real that “they smack you in the face with their concreteness” (Welch 14). He reminds the reader that despite Ben & Jerry’s crunchy granola, hippy, save the world persona, it still has “profitable growth” and “increasing value for stakeholders” as prominent elements in its mission statement. I agree with Jack that too often the reality escapes mission statements, however, no matter how “real” a strategy statement is, it still runs a great risk of becoming trite in the minds of the organization’s employees, who are permitted to escape the knowledge underlining each thought-provoked word.
The HBR article (cited above) used Trader Joes, a specialty food chain, as an example of a company that employs a visual description to bring concreteness to an abstract mission statement. Trader Joes describes its target customer as an “unemployed, college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo”. It’s a simple and exaggerated image, but its use provides the definition needed to bring its employees in tune with its goals. If you’ve been in a Trader Joes, you’ve witnessed customer service and product selection that would seem to fit the preferences of such a fictional customer.
Knowledge, whether conveyed in concise but ultimately complex strategy statements or solicited through an investigation of best practices, requires tangible and concrete stories, analogies, or visuals to ensure an effective translation and adoption. Current knowledge management resources are being invested in efforts focused almost exclusively on capturing knowledge bits from a network of internal or external experts. These efforts are creating repositories of “tappers” blindly dancing to their cacophonies and are cursed to fail.
Cheating knowledge
I get to witness OZ behind the curtain each evening from a student’s perspective as my wife, Kelly, works her magic correcting an endless cascade of term papers—all needing attention during this time of year before the semester’s end. This year I was enlisted to be OZ’s assistant, inheriting the task of scouring the Internet to find plagiaristic accomplishments. While it’s true that a thesaurus can easily imbue a high school student with scholarly tone, it cannot disguise the pubescent voice beneath it; so plagiarism is usually a fairly glaring offense. Kelly’s school, unfortunately, does not enforce great disciplinary rigor, so plagiarism has become prevalent, especially with the cut and paste ease of the Internet.
Checking for plagiarism has been a disturbing exercise for me. It’s surprisingly easy to find, if given enough time, yet somehow still eludes the judgment of proof. I have observed that the amateurs typically attempt to escape notice by stealthily working their way well past the 7th “o” in Goooooooooogle often using book reviews on Amazon or pulling thoughts from obscure sites that have a cozy feel to them, some with lovely repetitions of cat clipart nestled around the page borders. The professional pirates, however, find their booty by trolling the red-light district of intellect, visiting online shops, peddling college essays for as low as $5. These sites flash just enough of their wares to appear in search results, yet evade proof of a disingenuous student submission by requiring the purchase of the paper that appears to be that in hand—a trump card that any paying student can obtain. There are thousands of such sites and most provide justifications for plagiarism with contorted rationales that would make Freud blush.
Kelly’s Expository Writing class had the most plagiaristic feats. A class that’s purpose is to expose students’ ideas–reshaping the contextual ideas found in authors’ literary works to the uniquely individual perspective of each student—somehow reverted into a class concerned with stealing the ideas of others. Laziness may be the easiest diagnosis of the problem, but the culture of measurable outcomes that now seems deeply rooted in our leaning environments also shares some of the blame. Measurable standards are beneficial in setting benchmarks to ensure a level of proficiency, however, they have quickly overshadowed the ultimate goal of fostering independent, thoughtful, progressive, and knowing minds. As a result, the measure of an education has been further defined by raw outcomes and has in many ways transformed our learning institutions into production shops focused on efficiencies and end products rather than the rich process of self-realization.
Business is rightly rooted in value and efficiencies. But, like education, stands to suffer if measures and outcomes are permitted to overshadow innovation. The art of business is similar to expository writing; the success in reshaping ideas from multiple contexts to meet each unique, competitive environment is essential. Kelly’s bout with plagiarism illustrates the power and challenges of the hive mind. The Internet and other knowledge repositories impose on our ability to differentiate ourselves, our ideas, and our business strategies. Although the effortless accessibility of information has significantly shortened the knowledge cycle, it has also eased the ability to adopt ideas—stunting adaptive solutions and emboldening adoptive mindsets.
An HBR article by Al Jacobson, of Hartwell Associates, illustrates the impact search technologies have had on shortening the knowledge cycle and warns of the low returns organizations can expect if “knowledge management” continues to be seen as synonymous with “knowledge searching”. The article cites a study by Babson College’s Working Knowledge Center that asked more than 200 knowledge workers in four different organizations, each from a different industry, to keep a daily log over a ten-day period. The logs recorded over 3,000 knowledge interactions, which were organized into four categories:
• time spent searching for knowledge
• scheduling meetings with experts
• eliciting expertise
• interpreting knowledge
The distribution of time between the four categories was startling and ran against the tide of resources being sunk into knowledge repositories. The study found that employees were spending less than 17% of their time searching and scheduling (a surprisingly low percent) and more than 80% eliciting, interpreting, and applying (adapting the knowledge gained). Expertise location technologies along with global search portals like Google have matured and now effectively aggregate once dispersed information. The networks of information have been so effective that further investments in improving their ability will impact an increasingly insignificant piece of the knowledge-value continuum. The emphasis now needs to shift towards the knowledge adaptation side of the equation for the momentum in knowledge efficiency to continue. Ignoring this and failing to address the tendencies to cut short, or worse, avoid the required adapting of knowledge gained, threaten to undercut the efficiencies obtained thus far.
Kelly’s Expository Writing class dramatically cut short the knowledge cycle. Many of the students clearly benefited from knowledge efficiencies but rather than continuing the task at hand—adapting their thoughts to the literary context of the class—they adopted the knowledge they found as their own. The focus on business outcomes and measures particularly in the deployment of PI strategies such as Lean, which utilize techniques like the Kaizen method, often measure the number of ideas employees generate as a component of success. While the intent to reduce waste through small ideas from frontline employees is a noble concept, the emphasis on idea quotas as outcomes fosters a knowledge climate of “search and record”. This climate encourages the use of the search efficiencies, but does not address the needed task of shaping the found ideas to the unique competitive needs of an organization. The emphasis on idea generation for idea generation sake threatens to congest decision makers with hollow, plagiaristic ideas harvested from a fully deployed but misdirected workforce.
Misaligned expectations of the available information resources can backfire if not addressed. Knowledge management systems and global networks will never have all the answers let alone “the answer”, yet the ease of information often coddles those wishing to avoid the hard work of making the creative leaps to the adaptive answers required in success. These individuals exhaust their time and knowledge resources searching for the “silver bullet”, which may be the next mouse click away. Many confuse the Internet and knowledge management systems as answer banks rather than catalysts for progressive, self-generated solutions. Knowledge resources are coy mistresses for these “answer seekers” rather than the Muses they are intended to be.
Plagiarism is a temptation in any environment that gauges success by the number, completeness, and acceptability of ideas and information. Focus on such outcomes will define an organization’s most valuable asset (its employees) as an adoptable rather than adaptable resource. This cheats the organization from innovations gained through the learning process. In a competitive environment, the present is the past. Those seeking to adopt today’s knowledgebase will fail in the world of tomorrow and find the same grade on their strategic scorecards as Kelly’s plagiaristic students found on their report cards.
Picasso by numbers
Knowledge Management (KM) represents an opportunity to incorporate the human element into performance management, something that has been sorely lacking in the exhaustive progression of management tools that have attempted to sterilize the human art of business into bytes of ones and zeros. Touted as the cure, each new tool begs the attention of heart broken executives on the rebound–from TQM to Six Sigma to Lean–when in reality, it’s just a repackaging of predecessors with a few new bells and whistles. The opportunity to incorporate the human element, however, will be spoiled by the misdirected resources and technologies being sunk into KM that threaten to define it as nothing more than an a demented Alex Trebek who seems to know everything and nothing at the same time.
In response to Bain & Company’s latest Management Tools and Trends survey, which reflected the responses of 960 global executives, Darrell Rigby, senior partner and founder of the survey, said that the results showed that “technology’s influence on management tools is maturing”. Rigby found that nine in ten executives felt that information technology created significant competitive advantages. Surely KM was one of the management tools on the mind of executives when expressing the significant impact of technology. Yet, the IT advantages seem elusive; while the survey reflected substantial gains in the usage of KM (now nearing 55%), its satisfaction score ranked near the bottom of the group (fourth lowest). If the disparity between use and satisfaction widens, as the trend seems to suggest, this critical management tool is likely to experience the same fate as the many forgotten tools littering the PI landscape.
For years companies have deployed KM technologies focused on building repositories of knowledge. These dumping grounds have proven difficult to populate primarily due to the unnatural activity of recording for others what one already knows. Bain & Company, for example, created a system in the late 1980s, asking consultants to write one-page summaries of their projects. Yet, after 20 years it was only able to achieve 40% compliance in this initiative. Not until Bain hired and unleashed 20 knowledge “brokers”, charged with the task of encouraging and aiding consultants to write summaries, did a user base begin to establish itself. Raytheon and Xerox have encountered similar hurdles trying to extricate knowledge from their technicians. Raytheon used knowledge “coaches” to help guide input from its technicians’ experiences. Xerox seeded their Eureka system with ideas from management and gave rewards to those technicians that submitted tips.
In an attempt to circumvent the resources required to “broker” knowledge, organizations rely upon technology (the genie in the bottle) to effectively cloud the complicated human issues in learning and teaching. Big players, like Microsoft, which is rumored to be adding “expertise location” as future feature in its office suite (utilizing contextual interpretation of documents and the interconnectivity between people to locate expertise) are poised to create obscure oracles. AskMe Corp. has been engaged by the Commerce Department to create an expertise database. To navigate around the human “broker”, AskMe “simply” asks end users to build a profile by uploading their resume, a list of frequently asked questions, and other documents. The final component of AskMe’s database is an interface that allows knowledge seekers to request information from a list of individuals the system has defined as experts. Furthermore, it records all interaction–further refining expertise based on the participation rate of knowledge providers.
I have no doubt that this approach has “allowed experts to flourish and shine” as the Commerce Department claims. But what does it really buy an organization if those who ultimately engage the knowledge provider, the knowledge seeker, lacks the judgment to distinguish a true expert within a sea of Alex Trebeks? What defines an “expert”? Is it someone who is passionate and prolific? Is it someone who has an impeccable resume?
There is a place for the current pursuits in building KM repositories, but we need to be careful in setting our expectations for the returns on the knowledge found within them. Xerox estimates its Eureka database, with over 70,000 suggestions, cuts costs by 10%, saving millions in repairs. Technical repositories like Eureka effectively use technologies to simplify and distill activities often too complex to fit in a standard set of instructions but are repeated, with variations, again and again. Instructional KM systems like Eureka often meet expectations because the technical knowledge they hold is bite size, contextual, and well defined, requiring less effort to adopt. For the most ardent users of KM, however, many interrelated factors are at play. From subject-area expertise to tactical organizational intelligence, this complex kaleidoscope of knowledge cannot be simply replicated onto the paint-by-number canvas which current technological pursuits provide.
The underlying misalignment between the huge investments in KM technology and their required return is that it is ultimately not about refined expert and knowledge search technologies, save instructional knowledge; it’s about translating the universe of ideas into the adaptable folk taxonomy of the knowledge seeker. The gap between use and usefulness of KM will not only remain but will likely widen as technological answers by Microsoft and others pander to the notion that knowledge only needs to be searchable and accessible to be useful. Latching onto these initial technological answers will only bring disappointment to management and delay progress until a new sexier rendition builds enough momentum to woo the broken hearts of executives once again.
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