Knowledge Networking

"For teams or workgroups to be effective and competitive they must, 1) understand their customers’ requirements and the frequent changes to those requirements, 2) take action 
and be fully cognizant of the consequences of those actions, both intended and unintended, 3) detect changes both in the internal and external environment, and 4) develop their collective understanding of the complexities these many factors create"

"Everyone is talking about the enormous benefits to be had through collaborative working and better employee engagement. At last, you can throw off the shackles of that email inbox and really start to become more productive.

But is this vision we’re being sold by the social technology vendors actually being realised, or is life just a bit more complicated than that? The answer – as usual – lies somewhere in between."

"Despite the mainstreaming of email and other collaboration technologies in the past decade, senior managers still spend about 23 hours per week in face-to-face meetings (Rogelberg and colleagues, 2007).  Seventy-two percent of those managers said they spend more time in meetings than they did five years earlier.

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Henry Ford once observed, “Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” This is as true for organizations as it is for people. Since we began researching and writing about the challenges nonprofits face to make the most of organizational learning, we have heard from hundreds of social sector leaders on why and how they are circulating knowledge to rejuvenate their organizations and their fields.

In a series of focus groups with nonprofit practitioners1 and foundations, we found that participants were zeroing in on two questions:

• What knowledge is useful to capture? 
• With whom will we share what we learn?  "

Reblogged from KMbeing: KMb (Knowledge Mobilization) I recently read and enjoyed The Blog of Steve Schwartz: No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”).  Schwartz humorously states there are 3...

"So, what is the best free Knowledge Management tool?

Conversation!

Conversation is the lubricant to knowledge exchange and, in the right hands, or is that mind or mouth, it is the most valuable knowledge management tool available today. The problem is that so many people do a bad job of it. They don’t think about the structure of their face-to-face or text based conversations and they are not making the most of the best free knowledge management tool available to them."

Twelve collaboration principles that successful organizations follow.

"Knowledge-sharing practices are highly contextual. I have seen this with clients in multiple locations, across national borders. This makes sense when you consider that knowledge sharing is deeply personal as well as social, so it reflects the larger culture and the particular workplace."

Storytellers, the lubricant for knowledge flows - Influence the storyteller and you influence culture

"“Knowledge can only be volunteered, it can’t be conscripted”.

A quote from the redoubtable Dave Snowden. But is the same true for collaboration? If people are given the right tools and the right environment, will they spontaneously collaborate and share knowledge? Why do some people find it difficult to share and collaborate? Would incentives and rewards make a difference?"

"I was recently asked to give a talk/presentation on the topic “Personal Knowledge Management”, a topic close to my heart and something that I’ve been practising for more years than I care to remember. It’s also something that I’m happy to evangelise about, and hence I was more than happy to spend a bit of time collating my thoughts and preparing a brief presentation for the audience."

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Collaboration is the new way to work. Walls are being removed and collaboration points are being designed into workplaces. However, collaboration is not new. It is being revived though. In a new world of extreme connectedness, collaboration is rising as a strategic and practical way to gain competitive advantage.

At the core of collaboration is trust. Trust needs to be evident in the relationships – how work is done, how words are spoken, and how the results are accounted for. Without trust, collaboration falls apart quickly and, sometimes, irreparably."

"Most CIOs raise a flag when it comes to social — and with good reason. They just don’t see the business value in the current slate of social tools — most of which were developed with the consumer in mind, not a secure, compliant, enterprise user-base.

Developing an open-ended social dialog, without permissions, structure and control just doesn’t meet the stated goals and strategies of many enterprises that have spent massive dollars building out comprehensive, yet secure and compliant, collaboration platforms for their organizations."

"What’s the point in knowledge if you don’t share it? 

Collaboration and generosity are what drive innovation and engagement and yet organisations are often obsessed with hiding things away, with tucking their stories out of sight behind paywalls and firewalls, behind layers of impersonal websites and corporate comms that lack content and impact. We sit courses on ‘data protection‘ and ‘data security‘, but never on ‘generosity‘ and ‘collaboration‘."