Changing Information Behaviours

The current ‘information behaviour’ of the group is largely ad hoc. Each person does what their job description and the local ordinances and regional laws dictate. There is some peer-to-peer sharing but it tends to be local, among people who already know each other well, and it is done almost exclusively by e-mail. A complicating factor is that divulging personal information to others is a criminal offence, so there is a good reason not to share information. Most of the people in this ‘community’ do not know each other. There is considerable overlap in jurisdictional authority and responsibilities.

Why would anyone care about creating a community where none exists? Well, in the “food poisoning” example, if there had been such information sharing, the tragic poisoning of thousands of dogs and cats by Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, Del Monte, Hills and others might have been averted. And it’s estimated that every year one out of four people in affluent nations contracts at least one case of food poisoning. Much of the meat we eat is contaminated with salmonella and other toxic bacteria that thrive in the miserable conditions farmed animals live in. And poisoning of the food supply is high on the list of terrorism risks. So since prevention of food poisoning is, alas, not an option, the task becomes identifying, among the hundreds of millions of cases of food poisoning every year, the ones that will kill or permanently sicken the most people if a recall is not instituted quickly. It’s needle in a haystack work. Important work. My colleague’s prospective community of practice’s work is equally important.

Suppose we were to set up a database, a wiki, a group blog, an RSS aggregator page, a discussion forum and other tools to allow my colleague’s couple of hundred potential community members to share knowledge and collaborate. Would any of them use these tools? Would these tools replace the current ad hoc e-mail groups and peer-to-peer phone calls that are currently used for this purpose? Would prospective users be turned off by the substantial security front-end needed to protect confidential information? By the unfamiliarity of wikis and blogs? By the boring yet complicated user interface of commercial databases? And how would we deal with the fact some people want information pushed to them (in e-mails etc.) and others prefer to go and get it from a designated site they can pull it from when they’re ready?

Last year, riffing off an article by Dave Snowden, I identified a set of four necessary preconditions for organizational innovation. By analogy, I think they can be generalized into four necessary preconditions for any sort of organizational behaviour change, including information behaviour change:

1. a need or scarcity
2. a sense of urgency
3. a perspective shift (that suggests the current way of doing things is inadequate, and another way is possible)
4. a capacity for change

The first two preconditions go together, and Dave Snowden calls them starvation (internal motivation) and pressure (external motivation). You need people to want to change before they will. It is very difficult to create this sense of urgency, and those who try to do so usually find the sense of urgency they have momentarily created disappears as soon as they turn their backs. Generally that sense of urgency needs to be created by some real event. We do what we must, and there is no time left over in most of our lives for nice-to-do’s.

In my colleague’s particular case there is a need, but there is no sense of urgency. In other words, there is some personal ‘starvation’ but no real pressure.

How about a perspective shift? My sense is that new technologies, as enjoyable and intriguing as many of them are, do not constitute a perspective shift, a significantly better way of doing what they are doing now. They might get prospective community members to visit once or twice out of curiosity, but (just as most new websites and community spaces never get much traction) simply offering new information-sharing tools is unlikely to bring about any sustained information behaviour change.

Do the potential participants have the capacity for change? Are they willing to trust each other, to share peer-to-peer with people they don’t know, to pay attention to people who have no say in their performance evaluation? In my colleague’s case, unlike most groups I am familiar with, I think the answer is yes. Her cohorts are professionals who are largely self-driven, and I think they have great capacity for self-organization and self-management, if the other three preconditions could be met.

But my suggestion to my colleague is that, with only two of the four preconditions (#1 and #4) met, her best bet is to work on #3, and then put something in place that is ready when precondition #2 gets met by some major “food poisoning” crisis.

How do you create a perspective shift? I think the best approach is to create a story. This was how Steve Denning got the World Bank to see the value of a major investment in knowledge management ñ he told a (true) story about how sharing information between aid workers in two distant struggling nations saved lives. My colleague needs to find a story about how sharing information about “food poisoning” openly, promptly and extensively has “saved lives”. By telling and retelling that story, putting together the tools and processes for her community to enable them to share what they know more effectively, and then waiting patiently for the crisis that will create the missing sense of urgency, the community will, when it’s ready, be born and flourish. Until then, I think she should keep her expectations low.

What do you think? Am I too jaundiced about people’s propensity for change? Are there other preconditions for information behaviour change that I’ve missed, or can some of the four I’ve identified beshort-circuited? What’s the most successful sustained community of practice you’ve been involved with, and what has been the secret of its success?