• Self-awareness: check and correct your breathing, your posture; assess your physical comfort, your emotional happiness, your level of intellectual engagement for what you’re doing, and your energy level. Let-Self-Change as appropriate. (1 minute)
• Nourishment: drink a glass of water, and whatever other nourishment you assess you need. (1 minute)
• Attention: pay attention and open yourself to where you are, all your senses, and what’s going on around you; make sure you’re paying appropriate attention to the people and animals in your presence; make sure your current work/play environment is healthy. (1 minute)
• Flexibility & Resilience: do three cat stretches (upper body) and three hamstring stretches (lower body); slow yourself down, let go of whatever you were doing, be in the moment, and ensure you are simply enjoying the passage of time. (1 minute)

Everybody I described it to loved the idea, and quite a few people I know have tweaked it and adopted it themselves. After three weeks of experimentation, I refined and enhanced it to work even better.

The first problem I had with the program above was that within a couple of minutes of checking my breathing and posture I had reverted to entrenched bad habits again (breathing too rapidly and shallowly through the chest; slouching, whether sitting or standing). Once an hour wasn’t enough of a reminder to really make a difference. So now I’m trying another tack with continuous reminders: Each morning I put a piece of tape on my back, just below the collar of my shirt where it’s not visible. Whenever I hunch over or strain my head forward (and often at other times when I shift position, stand up or sit down or move my head to look at something) I feel it, very lightly. That’s my cue for a two-second check and correction of my posture and my breathing. So far it’s working like a charm, though whether I’ll be able to eventually wean myself off the tape remains to be seen.

And, having written recently about the power of both imagination and intentionality, I’ve added a step to my hourly routine to exercise these capacities. With a bit of reshuffling, the four minute self-improvement program now looks like this:

• Attention: (1 minute)
• pay attention and open yourself and all your senses to where you are and what’s going on around you; 
• self-assess your physical comfort, intellectual engagement, and emotional happiness; make sure your current work/play environment is healthy; drink a glass of water, and get whatever other nourishment you assess you need;
• connect: make sure you’re paying appropriate attention to the people and animals in your presence. 
• Resilience: (2 minutes)
• upper body stretches: do cat stretches and neck/shoulder exercises;
• lower body stretches: do hamstring, abdominal and balance exercises; 
• let go of stress: slow yourself down, draw yourself away for a moment from whatever you were doing, and do whatever relaxes you, to relieve both ambient stress and any recent ’surprise’ stresses that are still lingering.
• Intentionality & Imagination: (1 minute)
• set your intention: think about what you want to achieve in the next hour (exception: when you first awake, think about what you want to achieve more than anything else in the current day; just before you go to sleep, think about what you want to achieve more than anything else in your lifetime, and what might be the next simple step to achieving it);
• imagine its realization: imagine the end result, and the joy and accomplishment it will bring to you and others (and don’t think or worry about the process of getting there).

It was only after I’d been doing this three-step program for a day or two that I realized it’s a compressed version of the ‘presencing’ process illustrated in the graphic above: Attention is about sensing, Resilience is about letting go, and Intentionality & Imagination are about realizing, envisioning and letting come.

It’s early, but so far it seems to be working. I don’t worry about skipping the process in hours when I’m in the middle of something, so in 18 waking hours per day I probably do this routine 8-10 times.

I know some people have commented that this seems onerous, too self-demanding, and say I need to give myself a break and stop pressuring myself to ‘improve’. But I don’t find this process onerous at all. It’s only a half-hour total commitment per day, and because it’s only four minutes at a stretch it goes quickly. And the exercises, far from adding to the list of the day’s ‘work’ activities, actually seem to save me time by making the other 56 minutes of the hour more productive.

This seems to fit well, also, with my greatly streamlined Getting Things Done process and list, now that I’ve removed all the ‘urgent unimportant’ tasks from the list. In fact, because the list is so short and everything on it is important to me, I need only glance at it once (first thing each morning) to remind myself of appointments and priorities for the day, and it’s committed to memory and guides myactions for the day.

• Pay attention: Stand still and look until you really see. The more you see, the richer the palette you have for your imagination to draw on. If you want to imagine a monster, look at an insect up real close. If you want to imagine a perfect world, watch the life emerging after a thunderstorm, the droplets of rain on leaves in the sun.
• Spend time with children: If they’re young enough, the imagination has not yet been pounded out of them by television and games with stupid rules and teachers telling them to stop daydreaming. Listen and play with them and your imagination will come back to you, creaking through the rust.
• Remember your dreams: Keep pencil and paper beside your bed, and write down what comes to you just as you fall asleep and wake up, or those rare vivid dreams that awaken you in the middle of the night. These imaginary thoughts are more real than real life. They change you. Don’t lose them.
• Change your point of view: Lie down and look up. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. 
• Collaborate: Work with other people, ideally those who have imagination, and who think very differently from you. Have fun with it. Open your mind to other possibilities. Strive to produce something greater than any of you could have come up with alone.
• Transport yourself: Go somewhere different, physically or intellectually. Read lots of fiction and poetry. Visit places you’d never have thought of going. Stay with the locals. Volunteer. See how the other half lives. 
• Improvise: Explore your mental images. Go with them. Make something out of nothing. Imagine what you’d do if you needed to do something and didn’t have the tools. Look inside the windows of your mind. Briefly, slough off your protective arrogance and be open, submissive, vulnerable. 
• Break the rules. Or at least change them. Whatever the game, or the business process, or the routine, change it. Don’t always play Texas Hold ‘em. Play Countdown instead. Combine stuff. Make stuff up. 
• Believe, and make believe: Pessimism kills imagination. See past what is to what is possible. Create a new world, fantastically different from the real one. 
• Get away from the media: Formulaic television and radio and newspapers and magazines get you thinking that that’s the only way to do these things. Video games are tyrannical, leaving no room at all for imagination. Shun all things linear. Like top 10 lists.

All well and good, one reader wrote me, but what’s the process for imagining — how do you put these rules together into a step-by-step method that will allow you to truly imagine, quickly, consistently and powerfully?

As I’ve said before, imagination is not the same as creativity: You can only ‘create’ from things that are real, while you can imagine things that have never been and could never be real. Imagination, unlike creativity, is not constrained by what is possible.

But at the same time, our brain can only conceive by analogy and metaphor from what our bodies can perceive, so our imaginations are very much bounded by the limitations of our senses. That is why imagining a ten-dimensional universe is so difficult, and why most of the creatures in sci-fi are so absurdly humanoid. What’s worse, we are programmed from an early age to believe that imagining is a useless, escapist activity (remember what they did do the daydreamers in your school classes). Imagination is tolerated in children’s play, but we press children to root their imaginings in reality (by virtue of the almost brutal and constraining ‘realism’ of dolls, games and other toys we give them). Children are encouraged and rewarded to direct and restrict their imagination to imitation — role-playing the behaviours of ‘real’, idealized people (doctors, firemen etc.). Soon, their imaginations begin to atrophy from lack of exercise and practice. And they turn into us.

So what is the process for exercising and stretching the imagination so that that capacity returns? How can we regenerate the capacity that allows some to imagine and then create a geodesic dome, invent a truly new language, or conceive of applying the light polarization principles of butterfly wings to anti-counterfeiting techniques for banknotes, the painting of aircraft, or the invention of ecological eyeshadow?

It’s hard to explain what is, to me, an easy and intuitive process, to someone who might find it difficult and not at all obvious (now I appreciate the frustration of the instructors who, throughout my life, have tried and failed to teach me how to swim, to dance, or to meditate!) But here goes:

Preparation & Practice Steps (these are things that, if you do them regularly, will enable you to imagine more easily and powerfully when you want to or need to):

1. Continually think about possible applications of new learnings and discoveries: Whenever you are learning, reading, or perceiving, allow yourself the time and space to think about how what you are ‘taking in’ might be applied in interesting or important ways. If the character in the novel you are reading uses an intriguing painting or gardening technique, think about how this technique might be applied in forensics (could you write a CSI script around it?) or energy conservation (think: protective coatings) or teaching (think: the power of demonstration and visualization), or how it might apply in any other area that you care about. 
2. Play games that encourage and teach you how to make stuff up: Instead of prescriptive games that constrain your imagination, play games like Balderdash that practice and reward the imagination.
3. Open your senses: By paying attention to what you are really seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or even dreaming, and by ‘taking in’ all the details, you are creating perceptual memories that you can later draw on to imagine. Look closely at that blade of grass and you’ll see that it’s actually a little green stick-like insect perfectly camouflaged to protect itself from predators. And describe again how in that dream last night you managed to fly by inhaling hydrogen into your lungs and using the same arm and leg movements that allow you to float on a body of water.
4. Study nature: The natural world around us has evolved astonishingly complex and effective adaptations to problems, needs and barriers over millions of years. Because our civilized world is so new, so focused on narrow, transient, merely-complicated needs, and largely throw-away, unconcerned with the durability of its products and solutions and their adaptability, this civilized world is one of (by comparison) great imaginative poverty. By spending more time in the natural world and learning from it you will automatically be opening yourself to more imaginative possibilities. You will learn the art of metaphor, which is a springboard to imagination.

Putting that Preparation & Practice Into Action (here’s the actual step-by-step when it comes time to actively and purposefully imagine):

5. Motivate and energize yourself by setting a bold, positive objective or purpose for your imagining: Direct your imagination to some objective, a positive purpose that you care about. While it’s fun, true imagining is also work, and you’ll do best at it if you have a personal incentive to persevere at it, and to give it time. While dystopias may sell better, we are more inclined to spend time thinking about utopias. And if our imaginative thoughts make us happier, more positive, energized about possibilities, we will give them more time and energy and do a better job imagining as a result. And be bold in setting that objective: You’re not going to stretch your imagination if there’s a short and clear line from current state to your objective. Ending world hunger is not too bold an objective. 
6. Start with a blank slate: Disconnect your thinking from the ‘real’ world of you and here and now. Our analytical minds start with who, what, where, when, why and how, and are rooted in the current state of these things. The imaginative mind must be free from these mental constraints, especially the inhibiting, grounding ‘why’ and ‘how’. In your imaginings, the ‘who’ can be talking crows whose language we have suddenly learned to decipher, or light creatures who communicate and move telepathically, or a collective intelligence and awareness that takes joy and feels sorrow that is not personal yet is felt personally and profoundly. The ‘when’ and ‘where’ can be any time and place, or out of time in an Eternal Now, or a place where time runs backwards or makes random walks, or a place where you (whoever ‘you’ are in your imagining) are tiny, or huge, or able to perceive with senses that you can only imagine, or a place where the night sky is full of amazing objects changing in a continuous panorama. Whatever these things are that surface when you have made a blank space and time for them, let them come. Direct them towards your objective, but don’t force them to go there if they don’t want to. Make believe. 
7. Let your mind wander: Several of Frederick Barthelme’s 39 steps for great story-writing can be applied to any imaginative process. This advice includes: 

8. Make serendipitous and joyful connections and combinations: Amazing things happen at intersections. Create intersections by throwing things together in your mind. If they don’t stick, if there’s no intersection there, let them go, and bring in something else instead. Have fun with it — pick things that interest you or which you think are important and serendipitously draw them together. This is an improvisational process — you make it up as you go along, and don’t fret about where it goes and whether it could have been ‘better’. Non sequiturs, oxymorons, the juxtaposition of incongruities is funny (it is what makes Finnegan’s Wake such a brilliant work of art and imagination).
9. Give yourself time and space: Time limits and deadlines will prevent you from letting go and truly imagining. Great imaginings may come quickly or sneak up on you much later, and wake you up in the middle of the night. They will come when they come.

Well, that’s how I imagine anyway. It should be easy, but for most people it isn’t. Let me know if this works for you, or if you have other processes or steps that help and guide your imagining.

It’s time for the knowledge ‘champions’ of the world to get together, and to get our act together. As much as the idea of increasing the sharing and effective use of information and ideas is appealing to just about everyone, KM has not delivered on this promise. I believe time is running out.

The story of KM so far has been, for the most part, a failure — failure to articulate, to imagine, and to implement. We allowed the bold vision of knowledge-sharing to be diminished and appropriated by those who saw it is merely an exercise in automating the acquisition, storage and dissemination of documents. Many IT departments saw it as another facet of technology — as competition for resources and as little more than an extension of the document management and website management functions they were already responsible for. Many training departments saw it as the ‘content’ side of training, and wondered why it didn’t report to them. Most executives saw it as a means to speed up and reduce the cost of the back office, the same way the assembly line had reduced manufacturing times and costs. And the creative people who often had the Knowledge Director thrust upon them conceived of KM as a means for increasing organizational innovation, customer satisfaction and employee retention.

Now, a dozen years after the debut of KM, there has been little significant change in the efficiency, effectiveness or value of information processes or content in most organizations. Many companies that jumped early onto the KM bandwagon have all but abandoned it, while many organizations that waited are now repeating the mistakes of the pioneers. Despite this, interest in KM remains substantial, and this is because, while its promise has not really been realized, its potential is still enormous. And CEOs of many organizations, having studied the lessons of Enron, 9/11, Katrina and the Flu, have a nagging feeling that, no matter how great the cost of investing in KM may be, the ‘cost of not knowing’ is even greater:

What most organizations essentially did with KM was automate existing information processes. They took the paper ’stuff’ in manuals and memoranda and newspapers and converted it into digital form. That made it easier and (sometimes) cheaper to maintain, but did not increase its value, which was, if you were to ask most of the people on the front line, pretty marginal anyway. Organizations provided staff with access to the Internet, but most of those who were inclined to use it already had it at home and were using it there, without the restrictions imposed by the company — so that, too, was of marginal benefit. In some cases employees are still forced to shuttle critical information between their work and home PCs.

Most organizations, too, refused to abandon the top-down centralized information model that was already in place, merely institutionalizing it with firewalls, access restrictions, monster centrally-managed one-size-fits-all databases and websites and over-engineered, over-managed collaboration and community-of-practice tools. 

Essentially, neither managers nor early KM practitioners ‘got it’: KM is all about enabling people to obtain relevant, context-rich information, and connection with appropriate experts, easily, when they need it, so that they can be more effective doing their unique jobs.

As a result, the critical business information flows, shown in the top diagram above, are essentially unchanged from what they were a decade ago. There have been some minor changes in the technologies used for these flows, but for the most part these have not been significant in improving front-line effectiveness of workers, and in some cases have actually made work more difficult. Management continues to rely on well-entrenched IS to promulgate instructions and policy decisions and to extract, often annoyingly and disruptively, information from the front lines that it needs to make business decisions. To traditional managers, information is still all about telling employees what to do and making sure they do it.

Customers, outside the corporate firewalls and disinclined to participate in technology initiatives designed for the suppliers’ needs rather than theirs (as most e-newsletters, e-rooms and Extranets are), continue to interact, information-wise, with suppliers the same way they always have — receive (and usually turf) the marketing mail, put in their orders and rely on their ‘relationship manager’ to decipher the former and process the latter effectively. Business as usual, largely unaffected by KM.

Things happen the way they do in organizations for a reason. When people are unable to get the information they need ‘within the system’, they will find workarounds to get it in other ways. This is nothing new, and it is commendable — it shows people care about the quality and effectiveness of their work. The #1 means of getting and sharing information is, was, and probably always will be conversations. Pick up the phone, walk down the hall, use IM (if your company allows it), use Skype (if your company allows it), or, as a last resort, send an e-mail to the people who might know what you need to know.

It would make sense that KM would facilitate conversations, but if anything it has tried to obsolesce them — substituting context-poor databases that purportedly have the information you used to get from talking with people, more efficiently. Not surprisingly, this has rarely worked.

What we in KM need to do is go back to the original premise and promise of KM and start again — but this time from the bottom up:

• Develop processes and programs, and buy or build tools, that measurably improve the effectiveness of front-line workers in the performance of their unique and increasingly-specialized jobs;
• Refocus from top-down centralized content acquisition and collection to peer-to-peer content-sharing;
• Develop processes and programs, and buy or build tools, that measurably improve sense-making: the value and meaning of content in context;
• Refocus from top-down community-of-practice management to enabling peer-to-peer  expertise-finding and connectivity.

This bottom-up approach to KM, directed at the needs of individual employees and their peer-to-peer interactions has come to be called Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). It offers tremendous possibilities, and could finally realize the original promise and expectations of KM, but it can’t be done within the budget that most organizations set aside for KM. It requires a recognition from management that the four sets of activities bulleted above will, if properly implemented, yield huge improvements in the quality and effectiveness of the organization’s people’s work — repaying the investment many times over. The quote at right is what one executive told me when I suggested his company make such an investment. It shows that, in many companies, labour costs are still seen as a necessary evil to be minimized, and an additional investment in people, or knowledge for them, is out of the question.

Fortunately, management of most organizations has more sense than that. The breakeven point for an investment of two hours of personal coaching for each employee in an organization is, after all, a mere 0.1% improvement in that employee’s work effectiveness. And, while some executives may be impatient and disenchanted with the return on their KM investment to date, they still appreciate Drucker’s argument that improving front-line worker productivity is “the greatest challenge of the 21st century” — that the answer isn’t to do as much with less investment, but to do much more with more.
The lower diagram at the top of this article shows what’s possible — how valuable information flows could be enabled and facilitated by PKM. Step by step, here is what we would need to do to realize this potential:

Revamp and upgrade the role of Information Professionals from content managers to personal work effectiveness enablers. Most knowledge workers have figured out how to get the content they need to do their jobs well, without any help from KM. Centralized content management initiatives offer little or no incremental value to them. What they need is hands-on help using the information and technology at their disposal more effectively in the context of doing their own unique jobs. This does not lend itself, in most organizations, to either classroom or computer-based training — it needs to be face-to-face, anthropological: The IP needs to observe how the worker uses technology and information now, and then advise them how to do so more effectively. And at the same time, the IP needs to help each worker organize their personal content so that they can manage it effectively and find (again) what they need when they need it. We need to get IPs away from their collections and help-desks and out into the field helping workers one-on-one. This is the essence of PKM.

Reintermediate Information Professionals to filter and add sense, meaning and value to information content. One of the initial goals of KM was disintermediation — getting rid of the layers between front-line people and useful information. The problem is, most front-line people are now overwhelmed with the volume of information coming at them, and find most of what is available on the Internet too raw for their needs: They need help making meaning and sense of this information. IPs, as reintermediaries, can fill this need in two ways: They can massage raw information using visualizations, maps, tableaux, systems thinking charts, single frames, decision trees and other techniques, and they can add insight by synthesizing, analyzing, organizing and providing context for this information so that, in the hands of the knowledge worker, it is easily understandable, compelling and ready to apply.

Develop simple, automated mechanisms to facilitate peer-to-peer content-sharing with others inside and outside the organization. These mechanisms include:

• Customizable, easy-to-use, context-rich personal workspaces (similar to weblogs, but with additional functionality, security, and flexibility, while still being easy to learn and use) where all personal information that is shareable with others can reside.
• Automatic peer-to-peer publishing and subscription mechanisms that allow employees’ shareable content to be accessed by others, and high-value content from the Internet, and from other employees and outside colleagues, to flow automatically to the employee’s desktop.
• Automatic knowledge harvesting mechanisms that pull employees’ shareable content into a central searchable archive copy, to obviate the need for ’submitting’ knowledge to central repositories.

Develop mechanisms to enhance meaning and context of information content so that it ‘makes more sense’ and has more value to users. These mechanisms include:

• Templates, e-mail lists, lists of ‘experts’ and other aids for identifying and asking the right people for the right information on a quick-turnaround basis, in a single, easy-to-use just-in-time canvassing application. 
• Templates and models for creating high-context stories and narratives.
• Templates, models and self-study modules for creating visualizations, maps, single frames and other compelling, meaningful representations of information.
• Templates, models and self-study modules for creating systems thinking charts, structured thinking documents, analytical reports and other insightful distillations and interpretations of information.
• Templates, models and self-study modules for creating mindmaps, open space events and other support mechanisms that enhance the effectiveness of, and document, conversations.
• Templates, models and self-study modules for improving observation, listening and attention skills (e.g. cultural anthropology tools).
• Tools and mechanisms for surveying employees, customers and the ‘informed’ public and otherwise tapping the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ (including ‘prediction markets’ and decision support applications).

Develop mechanisms to enable peer-to-peer expertise finding and connectivity. These mechanisms include:

• Simple, one-click virtual presence applications for connecting person-to-person with people (individually and in groups), with full audio (including ability to record), video, whiteboard (see what others in a conference are looking at and doing) and application sharing capabilities.
• Simple, intuitive collaborative workspaces and worktools (enhanced, simplified versions of wikis, BaseCamp etc.)
• Well-designed, automated people-finding applications and directories.
• Simple presence-detecting and peer-to-peer introduction applications (enhanced, simplified versions of Dodgeball etc.)

The following table contrasts the traditional, top-down, just-in-case content-and-collection KM approach with the bottom-up, peer-to-peer, just-in-time, reintermediated, context-connection-and-sensemaking PKM approach:

*Content sharing and connectivity tools are collectively known as ’social networking’ applications.


Executives preoccupied with risk and cost minimization will continue to wait on the sidelines for pioneers to show them that the risks and costs of such programs are far outweighed by the benefits of better productivity, more engaged, informed and insightful employees, better connectivity, more context-rich knowledge-sharing and improved collaboration among employees and outside experts.

I first got interested in the idea of bottom-up personal knowledge management, focused on the unique needs of each front-line employee, in 2003, my last year as Global Director of Knowledge Innovation for a major professional services firm. I’d been asked to investigate a leveling-off of use of the firm’s award-winning centralized knowledge resources, and decided to do the research through personal interviews with non-users, rather than the usual user surveys. We did about 100 interviews, and tried to get at the root causes of the problems and concerns they cited. So for example while many interviewees said they ‘couldn’t find’ what they were looking for, we tried to discover why this was: Was the tool too complex? Was the training inadequate? Was there too much content to wade through? Did they just not know where to look? Was the content badly indexed? Was it in the wrong format for convenient (re-)use? Or perhaps what they sought didn’t exist at all. Or worse, they weren’t motivated to make the effort to look for it.

In describing this work I’ve used three of the interviews that were especially illuminating. One of these was a corporate finance practitioner who confessed he’d completely stopped reading newspapers because ‘general’ knowledge was unnecessary for his work, and used his PC only for e-mail and business valuation spreadsheets. A second was an audit manager who said she couldn’t ‘afford’ the intrafirm charge for research work and simply had no time to do such research herself, so she did without; she also confessed that she’d never been taught how to find stuff on her own PC and could never find what she needed on her own hard drive. A third was a tax partner who delegated all ‘knowledge work’ to subordinates or assistants, even printing out and routing his e-mails. When I asked him about Instant Messaging, he said he ‘handled it the same way’. Ouch!

My conclusion from the interviews was that most of the firm’s front-line people didn’t use the knowledge resources because they didn’t know how. I had been reading about a KM process that entailed one-on-one coaching of front-line people to use knowledge and technology effectively, and named this (for internal selling purposes, and with a tip of the hat to Drucker) Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI). When I proposed PPI as the solution to ineffective knowledge use, however, my boss said he was doubtful that, if they weren’t willing to take the time to attend the firm’s courses or computer-based training on the use of knowledge resources, employees were just as unlikely to make time for PPI. He sent me back to find out why practitioners didn’t know how to use the resources effectively.

When I went to conduct the second round of interviews, it became clear that some of the interviewees had given me the answers they thought I wanted to hear because they didn’t know the real answers. They were also blunter and more forthcoming when I went back to suggest that perhaps their ignorance of use of the firm’s knowledge resources was partly their fault. This time, the corporate finance practitioner told me he was paid for his specialized technical knowledge, not for his understanding of business issues. He described the powerful, integrated newsfeeds and personalizable news profiles, the paintakingly populated databases, and the collaborative spaces we provided as “nice to have, not need to have”. He was, he said, “unmotivated, so far” to learn more about what we had made available.

The audit manager pulled out an independent consultant’s report that listed in the criteria clients used to select a professional services firm. In order they were (1) strong pre-existing relationship with someone on the team, (2) fit and likability of the pursuit team, (3) senior face time spent with client key decision makers during the pursuit process, (4) technical competency and experience of the pursuit team, (5) understanding of the client’s processes and organization, and (6) understanding of the client’s business and industry. There is just no time, she told me, for stuff that clients don’t think very important. If she had more time, she said, she would be spending it out at clients building relationships, not at her PC looking for knowledge. [I later interviewed some clients who somewhat sheepishly corroborated the findings in this report, and said this audit manager was wise in setting her priorities.]

And the tax partner grabbed me as I passed near his office, whisked me inside, and told me how delighted he was that, after I’d mentioned it, he’d got his assistant to show him how to use Instant Messaging. “If a client calls me on the phone with a question, sometimes I can IM a staff member and get confirmation of the answer while the client is still online, so I save research time and the client is very impressed”, he told me. “It’s stuff like this IM that really makes you guys valuable, not those giant repositories you build.” If that weren’t distressing enough, he confided that he was concerned that some of those ‘giant repositories’ were accessible to everyone in the firm, and could we please restrict access to these to tax practitioners only? He patted me on the back. I sighed.

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized content we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI said they would love to receive PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

Subsequently I met with a number of the firm’s competitors, and KM leaders of several other organizations that have experienced some frustration with the performance of their KM programs, and almost all of them expressed substantial interest in (and sympathy for) these findings and this approach.

From these interviews and subsequent discussions with leading KM gurus, notably the UK’s David Gurteen, emerged the concept of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Some of the PKM elements are starting to be used, at least in part and in pilots, in quite a few organizations.

Here’s a primer on how some of these elements can be introduced in your organization:

Personal Productivity Improvement: (leading practice: Ernst & Young, KPMG)

1. Pre-interview each employee in the organization to understand their job, what knowledge and technology they use and how they use it.
2. Pre-assemble a file of possible ‘leave-behinds’ — ‘cheat sheets’, step-by-step instructions, FAQs, bookmark lists etc. that the employee is likely to find useful, based on your previous PPI sessions with others with similar jobs or learning styles.
3. If you don’t already have a personal content management program (see below) get this set up for the employee first.
4. Schedule about an hour face-to-face with the employee. The first half-hour should be spent observing and asking questions of the employee to identify significant productivity problems. The second half-hour should be spent showing the employee more effective ways of doing their work, stepping them through the leave-behinds, answering questions and getting feedback from the employee on the value they feel they have received from the session.
5. Compile a list of observations and systemic problems that PPI cannot resolve, and present them to senior management for them to address.

Personal Content Management:

1. Work with each individual employee to help them organize and index their ‘My Documents’ and e-mail folders in a way that makes sense for them. A standard firm-wide taxonomy is rarely appropriate and with current technology it is no longer necessary. Each person’s files should be set up the way they would set up their personal filing cabinet if the documents were all hard-copy. Rather than by subject-matter, the most effective organization scheme is often ‘taskonomic’ rather than taxonomic — indexed by how or when it will be (re-)used.
2. Deploy Google Desktop or some other fast, simple, powerful desktop search tool.
3. Use RSS feeds to simplify ‘publishing’ and ’subscribing’ to others’ content, and show employees how to use them and how to integrate this content into their personal taxonomy.
4. If you have canvassing and/or harvesting programs (see below) show employees how to use them and how to integrate this content into their personal taxonomy.
5. Develop and disseminate (with simple one-page instructions or FAQs) routines and practices for effectively capturing, filing and finding relevant knowledge in the context of what it is to be used for.

Personal Shared Workspaces, Publishing & Subscription:

1. Educate the project team.
2. Identify the pilot group: There are three constituencies in organizations who will more readily see the benefits of using personal shared workspaces and who are therefore natural pilot groups: (a) subject matter experts who are inundated with requests for information and advice, who could benefit from having their ‘electronic filing cabinet’ accessible to and browsable by others in the organization, (b) those in the company who are already publishing newsletters and similar regular bulletins, and (c) those who are coordinating community of practice networks.
3. Develop a starting personal ‘taskonomy’ and starting personal content archive for each pilot group member.
4. Select and adapt a commercial weblogging tool and/or develop your own personal shared workspace tool.
5. Get the IT subteam to: Convert personal content archives to HTML & ëbulk publishí them, create a personal TOC for each group member, and develop a password protection scheme.
6. Offer everyone in the firm a brief seminar on personal shared workspace publishing & subscribing. Let interest in using these tools spread virally.
7. Talk up personal shared workspaces outside the organization.
8. Set up a personal shared workspace help/monitoring group.

Automatic Content Harvesting: (leading practice: Hill & Knowlton)

1. Create separate Public and Private ‘My Documents’ and e-mail folders on each employee’s hard drive.
2. Whenever users ’save’ or store a document or message, prompt them to decide whether the document should be stored in the Public (shareable) or Private folder.
3. Establish an automated mechanism like RSS to regularly ‘harvest’ the Public folder information, to a central mirror site that other users can browse, and/or in response to just-in-time canvassing searches (see below), peer-to-peer.
4. Encourage people in the organization who maintain the most valuable context-rich content (e.g. subject matter experts, network coordinators and newsletter editors) to use personal shared workspaces (see above) to post and archive their content as part of their Public folder.

Just-in-Time Canvassing, and People-Finders: (leading practice: Lend Lease corporation)

1. Use social network analysis (mapping or interviewing) to identify the de facto networks of expertise and trust in the organization.
2. Use these to identify network coordinators, the ‘people to go to first’ on key subject matter areas for your organization.
3. Have these coordinators create, maintain and publish Canvassing Lists (e-mail groups) with e-mail, IM, phone and other contact information for the people in these subject matter networks, so that anyone in the firm who wants to canvass people in a network can do so with one click. These lists should include experts outside as well as inside the organization.
4. Create Canvassing Templates, forms that people can fill in quickly and simply to describe what expertise they’re looking for, and then send them to one or more Canvassing Lists.
5. Devise a simple one-page instruction sheet/FAQ on how to effectively use the Canvassing Lists and Templates, which communication media to use in different circumstances to contact them, and how to deal with telephone tag, non-responses and other situations when canvassing response is inadequate. It should also deal with appropriate etiquette and protocols to ensure the canvassing process isn’t abused.
6. If you also have an Auto-Harvesting program (see above), consider putting experts’ weblogs and other context-rich resources in the Canvassing List to use as a surrogate for people who are unable or unwilling to respond to canvassing requests personally.

For many organizations, the traditional approach to KM is no longer a viable option. I believe PKM offers a sensible alternative, one that draws on some of the success stories in social networking and some pioneering programs of some of the world’s leading knowledge-enabled organizations. It also resonates with the ways in which we have always shared what we know most effectively: through conversations, stories, just-in-time inquiries through those we know and trust, learning by watching others, and copying others on documents, messages and learnings we believe they would find valuable.

This is a complex system approach to KM: It respects that things happen in organizations the way they do for a reason, and that people will find workarounds whenever processes, including knowledge processes, work suboptimally. Rather than trying to impose new processes and infrastructure on people, PKM attempts to support and reflect the ways we intuitively learn and share what we do. It adapts technology to people’s behaviour, rather than forcing behaviour to adapt to new technology.

What is missing, still, is more pioneers. Cost reduction, outsourcing and risk management are the strategic issues of the day in the corner offices of most organizations, and improving employees’ work effectiveness and the quality of their work are not as high on the priority list. The onus is on us as KM champions to create new, compelling value propositions for KM (and specifically PKM), to produce business models that measure what’s important and come up with astonishing ROIs for investment in PKM activities, to stress the Cost of Not Knowing without scare-mongering, and to continue to do small-scale experiments and share the results of our experiments with each other. That’s the only way to get the attention of senior executives, and get them to startinvesting again.

And this time, once we do get that attention and investment, we’d better learn from past mistakes and do the job right.

The objections point out that ‘crowds’ are not great at doing everything. But that’s exactly Surowiecki’s point: The very things that crowds are good at are precisely those things that executives, consultants and experts pride themselves on doing.

A couple of readers asked me if I could distill Surowiecki’s arguments into some kind of decision tree to decide who is best to make decisions. This is my response.

We need to start by looking at who the alternative decision-makers are, and what knowledge, skills and talents they offer that are relevant to the decision-making process:

These would be, I think, Surowiecki’s assessments, based on the research in his book. They are also mine, based on thirty years of varied business experience. The reason why executives, consultants, senior managers and other experts don’t rate ‘high’ in any of the six categories of relevant capacities for decision making is (a) they are usually individuals, and can only know as much as any busy individual can know, (b) in the case of outside experts, they lack experience/context actually working for the organization, and (c) in large organizations executives are paradoxically sheltered from awareness of problems due to the “bad news doesn’t travel upwards” (because “they shoot the messenger”) information behaviour that is endemic to our society.

For those who haven’t read The Wisdom of Crowds, a ‘qualified crowd’ is one that is (i) intellectually diverse, (ii) independent and objective, (iii) each member has access to unique knowledge, (iv) each member is basically informed, and (v) each member is appreciative of (cares about) the problem or decision at hand.

Surowiecki identifies five things that qualified crowds can — if asked appropriately — be very good at:

• ascertaining (all the) pertinent facts surrounding an issue
• predicting outcomes
• making a decision among a discrete set or finite range of alternatives
• determining an optimal process to follow (in simple or complicated situations, but not complex ones)
• assessing causality (in simple or complicated situations, but not complex ones)

In all except the first type, the crowd must be given a set or range of alternatives to choose from, and, when they are, Surowiecki says, the ‘errors’ in judgement tend to cancel each other out, so that the crowd’s consensus tends to be consistently better than that of executives, consultants and other experts. If you don’t buy this, you’ll have to read the book — his argument is compelling and well-substantiated (it’s also intuitively sensible).

In situations of the first type, ascertaining (all the) pertinent facts surrounding an issue, the crowd is contributing more collective knowledge than any small group of ‘experts’ could hope to have, and are ‘better’ at doing this by sheer dint of numbers.

So what happens in the real world when important decisions must be made? In my experience, this is the typical process:

1. The executives decide whether they have sufficient knowledge of the problem, sufficient knowledge of solutions that have worked in the past in similar situations, sufficient experience solving similar problems, sufficient knowledge of people who can help solve the problem, and sufficient knowledge of relevant tools, models and methods that can help. Usually they decide they already have all these things (or feel they should have them) so they do not consult others. If they don’t, they tend to bring in outside experts, who lack contextual knowledge of the problem. They may involve researchers. They are unlikely to involve other subordinates in the organization, or customers.
2. The executives decide whether they have sufficient capability to imagine new solutions that might work to solve the problem. Usually they decide they do (or feel they should) so they do not consult others. If they don’t they tend to bring in outside experts, who lack contextual knowledge of the problem. They may involve creative people within the organization, either individually or collectively. They are unlikely to involve other subordinates in the organization, or customers.
3. The executives decide all by themselves which of the alternative solutions that have come from steps 1 and 2 to implement. That, after all, is why they’re paid the big bucks.

If you accept the capacities in the chart above, the result of this ‘business as usual’ process is clearly sub-optimal. Consultants and other outside experts bring precisely the capacities that the executives already have, and none of the ones they lack. Involving researchers and creatives will improve the quality of the decision somewhat, but not as much as involving the crowd. And that assumes that nothing gets lost in the ‘translation’ of knowledge between the researchers, creative people and executives. What’s worse, many researchers and creative people will tell the executives what they want to hear, not necessarily the truth — they lack the independence and objectivity that ‘qualify’ a crowd.

Here by contrast is the optimal process, for complicated (not complex) problems:

1. The executives identify and qualify a crowd of co-workers, customers (including prospective customers) and informed members of the public, and interview them, in interactive sessions witnessed by the organization’s creative people, to augment their (the executives’ and the crowd’s) collective knowledge of the problem, knowledge of solutions that have worked in the past in similar situations, experience solving similar problems, knowledge of people who can help solve the problem, and knowledge of relevant tools, models and methods that can help.
2. The executives then charge the creative people (who by virtue of their involvement in step 1 now have a deep contextual understanding of the problem and how to approach it) with imagining new solutions that might work to solve the problem, working both individually and as a team. These creative people do not assess or rank these potential solutions — their job is simply to identify alternatives.
3. The executives then canvass the crowd from step 1, presenting them with the solutions that have worked in past, those which the executives based on their experience think have potential, plus the alternatives that were surfaced in step 2. The crowd makes the final decision.

This learn-analyze-imagine-assess-decide-on-action process involves each group of stakeholders doing what they do best. If there are appropriate incentives for the crowd (and sometimes that’s as simple as recognition and thanks), this process need not be cumbersome, and to some extent it can be automated (members of the ‘crowd’ can to some extent self-qualify by going through an online qualification survey, and step 3 can also be done entirely online). It is course frightening to executives, because it reveals their true, limited value in the decision-making process. In fact just about anyone can perform the three steps above (they are mostly administrative and facilitative), bringing into question the need for highly-paid executives, and a hierarchical decision-making organizational structure, at all. So this approach is clearly more amenable to egalitarian, non-hierarchical organizations. It’s also bad news for the consultants and outside experts — they aren’t needed in the process at all.

Here, from an earlier article, are 25 business problems that such an approach might solve:

1. How can we improve employee productivity?
2. How can we reduce business/credit/security risk?
3. How can we become more innovative?
4. Should we outsource IT, KM, HR and/or marketing?
5. Which of these new product ideas will be successful?
6. What price should we sell this new or old product for?
7. How will sales/prices be affected by future innovations?
8. How will sales be affected by inflation, int. rates etc?
9. How will material & labour costs change in the future?
10. How can we reduce our fixed costs & overhead?
11. How can we increase our market or customer share?
12. How can we (a) find or (b) keep the best people?
13. Which acquisitions should we make, at what price?
14. How much is our company worth?
15. What service/community wraparounds would work?
16. How much should we be paying staff, management?
17. Which companies should we partner with?
18. Which functions should we centralize, decentralize?
19. How should we penetrate a new market/demographic?
20. How can we increase customer satisfaction/retention?
21. Which suppliers should we use?
22. How can we reduce employee theft, fraud, error?
23. Where are we paying more taxes than we have to?
24. How should we protect our intellectual property?
25. What new businesses should we start, or spin off?

I said that the above process is optimal for complicated problems. What about complex problems, like these?:

26.  Should our central bank raise interest rates next month, and by how much?
27.  What is the $US going to be worth, relative to the Euro or a global currency basket, this time next year?
28.  Which alternative voting system is the best?
29.  What’s the best way to motivate people in the third world to have fewer children?
30.  How could we break our dependence on fossil fuels within the next decade?
31. What’s the answer to eliminating popular support in many countries for terrorist attacks?
32. How can we fairly reduce global disparities between rich and poor, and improve distribution mechanisms to get resources desperately needed by the poor to their destinations?
33.  How can we motivate both polluters and the public to take appropriate steps to stop global warming?
34. How can we create a health care system that offers quality, universal care affordably?
35. How can we create an education system that teaches critical life skills and enables its graduates to be self-sufficient, productive, and informed, engaged citizens?

The process for such problems must of necessity be emergent, rather than prescriptive as for merely complicated problems. Such problems do not lend themselves to (anywhere near) ‘complete’ knowledge, rigorous analysis, determination of clear causality, or predictability. In fact, such problems don’t have ’solutions’ per se at all. What can emerge is a collective understanding sufficient to allow all of the participants in the process to contribute knowledgeably, positively and responsibly to addressing the problem in self-organized adaptive ways, individually and collectively, in the context of their own lives and work. This process is essentially the same process that indigenous cultures have used for millennia to address such problems, and the same process used by ‘complex system’ methodologies like Open Space:

1. The project champions constitute themselves and selected researchers (perhaps including a qualified or self-qualified crowd) to collect, organize and share as much relevant information as possible about the problem/issue.
2. The project champions then invite anyone with sufficient passion around the issue to commit appropriate time and energy to the project, to study the information collected in step 1 and attend one or more facilitated, self-managed sessions to explore and discuss the problem/issue. Those who accept the invitation become in effect a second self-qualified crowd.
3. The project champions document the proceedings of these sessions and facilitate the organization of groups to pursue collective actions emerging from them, involving attendees and others as appropriate. But, most importantly, each attendee is charged with the responsibility to pursue individual actions and to individually initiate other collective actions involving non-attendees, that they think make sense in the context of their own life and work as a result of the understanding they have acquired from the sessions.

This learn-explore-imagine-converse-emerge-let-self-decide-on-action process is structurally similar but significantly different in methodology and responsibility than that outlined above for complicated problems. Each process respects the different characteristics of the problem/issue and appreciates the need for a different approach to it.

What I have observed over the past few years is encouraging: Organizations with enlightened leadership (and leaders with modest egos) appear to intuitively appreciate the limitations of the ‘boss-decides-in-a-vacuum’ approach to management, and are starting to involve line staff and customers more in at least the information-gathering (step 1) part of the decision-making process. This isn’t tapping the wisdom of crowds but it’s a big step in the right direction. Some organizations are even beginning to realize that prescriptive ’solutions’ to complex problems (and generally all problems that involve human behaviour and interaction are complex) don’t work, and are starting to devolve authority and responsibility to individuals on the front line to make more tactical decisions.

I’ve seen less willingness to involve creative minds in organizations in imagining alternative solutions, to actually devolve decision-making authority to crowds, or to give individuals decentralized authority and responsibility to make strategic decisions. But perhaps as some brave organizations start to do this, successfully, others will follow.

Laterally-thinking readers will probably have realized that these processes aren’t limited to business or even organizational contexts. Think about its application to problems in a family context, where the larger community is the ‘crowd’ (if you’re lucky enough to live in a community whose members know and care enough about each other to qualify as a crowd under Surowiecki’s five criteria) — and you’ll understand what ‘ittakes a village to raise a child’ could really mean.