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.