how to save the world

What makes it even harder is that we often don’t know what we need — what the ‘future state’ would look like if we ‘solved’ the problem. When it comes to global warming, for example, some see the ideal future as one of strict conservation, while others see it as one of miraculous new technologies that allow energy consumption to increase forever. It’s hard to figure out how to get there when you can’t even agree on the destination.

The School for Designing a Society focuses the attention of activist groups on collectively answering the questions “What are you for?” and “What would you consider a desirable society?”, questions that identify the destination, the future state, before attempting to prescribe a way to get there.

Matt Dineen at Passions and Survival interviewed the School’s ecological design instructor, Rob Scott. He said that the school’s objective is to go beyond available alternatives. In our modern world of horrific imaginative poverty, solutions are presented to us as dichotomies: Party A or Party B, socialism or capitalism, SUV or hybrid, Brand X or Brand Y. All these ‘choices’, which are not really choices at all, have the effect of focusing us on the available alternatives, and precluding consideration of other possibilities that don’t currently exist, but could exist.

As globalization succeeds in McDonaldizing the planet, these limited available alternatives become ubiquitous, and it becomes harder and harder to find, or imagine, additional possibilities: a society without political parties, a gift economy, a world where cars are unneeded, buying NoLogo products from people we know and trust.

By starting with an imagined Future State, one not directly or obviously connected to the Current State, we open ourselves up to additional possibilities, beyond available alternatives.

The problem is, we are now so rooted to the Current State and its limited choices that in imagining the Future State we subconsciously start with the Current State and linearly, incrementally design the Future State from there. In so doing, we short circuit the innovation process.

Because we have forgotten how to imagine, we no longer know what is possible, and therefore, we no longer know what we need. The iPod was the product of imagination — if you asked people in the days of vinyl and cassette tapes how they would like the distribution of recorded music improved, you would have received responses anchored to the Current State of the time: make records unscratchable; make cassettes that you don’t have to turn over to play the other side.

So the School is a great idea. But only if its enrollees either haven’t forgotten how to imagine, or have relearned to do so. My guess is that imaginative people are a tiny minority, and in the fracas of a brainstorming session with the huge majority of unimaginative people, they would be drowned out. They wouldn’t be heard. The vast majority could not imagine what they were talking about. Suppose it was you, in 1970, surrounded by a pile of disks and people invested hugely in them, imagining a future where all music could be downloaded free over the airwaves, in seconds, onto a device that would hold your whole music collection inyour breast pocket. Can you hear the laughter?

How do we re-learn to imagine, so we know what we really need? I’ve already written about that.

Now. at last, I think I have a framework that applies to just about any organization. It’s pragmatic, and less ambitious than many such frameworks. It responds to what I keep hearing from people on the front lines of organizations — it addresses the real problems that most people have finding and using information effectively. It is focused on context and connectivity rather than on content and collection, on personalization and engagement and enablement rather than monster repositories and websites.

Two months ago I summarized this, and now, whenever I am asked to speak about KM or social networking (which is often), this is the gist of what I tell them. Since it’s short, I’m repeating the whole article rather than linking back to it:

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In a recent post where I waxed rhapsodic about how the best approach to everything could be reduced to three magic words (love, conversation, community), I presented this one-sentence summary of how this might apply to knowledge management (KM):

In another recent post I laid out how the work of information professionals is now being done in (what I consider) leading organizations, around five key types of deliverables: awareness products, research products, guidance products, self-assessment and connectivity tools, and facilitated events.

At the request of several readers, I’ve pulled this all together in the table above into a framework for what some have called KM 2.0, but which I prefer to call KM 0.0, because it’s getting back to the roots of why and how people share what they know. It could also be called PKM — Personal Knowledge Management — because it’s about self-managed content and peer-to-peer connectivity.

I think the yellow column above — the well-worn and failed traditional approach to KM that many of us tried to institute in the 1990s, based on content and collection — is pretty self-explanatory, and depressing as a legacy. The green column above is slowly evolving in many organizations, but not because knowledge ‘leaders’ and managers have realized its potential. Rather, the emerging KM 0.0 is being instituted by people on the front lines and at the edges of organizations — working around the established systems and security standards of the organization.

Most of this KM 0.0 stuff is inexpensive and ubiquitous, so enterprising information and IT professionals can introduce it without having to get permission and resources from management. Here’s a walk-through of what it comprises:

1. Personal content management tools — everyone manages their own content, just-in-time, harvestable. Forget the giant central content repositories. KM 0.0 focuses on the stuff on everyone’s personal (mostly portable) devices. Instead, teach your front-line people how to effectively manage and organize this personal content (using Google desktop etc.), so it complements their memory and replaces their filing cabinets. Then, show them how, by saving this personal content in a ‘public’ partition on their hard drives, it can be harvested by others, just in time. So when someone in your organization (or even outside it) is looking for know-how, know-what, or know-who, their search will scan all the ‘public’ content in all the hard drives of the company, and not only return the relevant content, but the contact information of the people who authored it, and who can provide context for it.
2. RSS-publishable and subscribable personal web pages, blogs and small-group-created wikis — Give everyone in the organization a very simple, intuitive set of tools for authoring their own individual (blog-type tools) and small group (wiki-type tools) content. So everyone becomes a publisher and, with RSS technology, everyone (authorized) can subscribe to everyone else’s content. Each person gets their own personal daily ‘newspaper’ of articles authored by the people whose content they want to read. So instead of forcing information flows to conform to the hierarchy of the organization chart, you enable anyone to send and receive information they care about.
3. Communities of passion — self-managed and ad hoc, conversation-focused. So no matter who you are, you can set up a community yourself on any subject, and invite anyone else with passion for that subject, and in moments be up and connected with that community, running it yourselves, with the features you want, not the company ‘standard’. 
4. Stories and visualizations as the principal formats of content — Instead of context-stripped ‘best practices’, authors are encouraged to tell stories and provide anecdotes that provide the detail and context for understanding what the information really means. And information professionals add further value by using visualizations to condense volumes of data and text into forms that the human mind more easily comprehends.
5. Open access: everything inside the organization is open and shared outside unless it’s illegal to do so. By participating in a community of the whole world, you open your organization to outside innovation, to open source resources, to peer production with customers.
6. Reintermediation: High-value, high-meaning RSS-subscribable content is produced by internal info-professionals who know how and why the people of the company use information, instead of buying and licensing it from outside ‘experts’. Much of that IP-produced content is in three formats, to answer three ubiquitous questions about knowledge:
• awareness alerts (what’s new that’s important to our organization?)
• research (what does it mean?)
• guidance (what should we do about it?)
7. A simple set of connectivity enablers: Going far beyond one-size-fits-none e-mail, the connectivity suite includes
• IM — for real-time canvassing and impromptu connection
• virtual meeting tools — desktop video and other simple ubiquitous real-time tools to provide ‘virtual presence’ without the cost and time needed to travel to meet face-to-face
• organization and facilitation of real & virtual, community-self-initiated, self-managed events that help communities self-organize, including Open Space hosting & facilitation
• people-finding and community-creating tools
8. Public site geared to what the customer wants to know: Featuring multimedia interactive self-assessment tools and other resources customers want and can really use, instead of the flat sales-and-marketing material transcribed from company brochures

These eight components of KM 0.0 / PKM are the antithesis of what most large organizations provide as Knowledge Management resources. Most of them are quite simple and inexpensive to implement. They simply enable trusted, context-rich conversations among communities that care.Imagine that.

This is the legacy of a regime that promised a new form of leadership both before and after 9/11. There could be no better demonstration that relying on self-serving and self-proclaimed ‘leaders’ to do things for you is a ruinous path.

Yet what are Americans rallying around now? Different self-serving and self-proclaimed leaders ambiguously promising ‘change’. How far will the cult of leadership in the US (and it’s spreading worldwide, like a toxic disease) go?

In business, ‘leaders’ are paid obscene sums of money (tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each per year) to offshore jobs, reduce quality and services, close down operations, merge with other organizations with their own self-serving ‘leaders’, and otherwise cripple the US economy in the interests of ‘maximizing shareholder value’ (no accident that these ‘leaders’ are paid mostly in shares, so it’s their value they’re maximizing).

Millions blindly follow religious ‘leaders’ who preach hatred and suppression of basic human rights and freedoms, and the popularity of such ‘charismatic’ despots is growing by leaps and bounds.

Drug addled professional actors, singers and athletes attract groupies and awards and fortunes and the adoration and emulation of millions, as part of the celebrity leadership cult, and this popularity can often be parlayed into political or business ‘leadership’.

And universities charge extravagant sums for ‘executive’ programs that presume to teach ‘leadership and management’, while meanwhile, because of a desperate shortage of entrepreneurial skills, most graduates can look forward to a life of wage slavery working for these ‘executives’, many of whom had their ‘leadership’ positions bought for them by rich parents.

As I reported a couple of years ago, Peter Block, one of the founders of the discipline of Organizational Development, thinks that, in business at least, it’s absurd:

We don’t need ‘leadership’ or ‘leaders’. What we need is experimenters.The way to create working models that work better than the dysfunctional ones we have now, in a complex system where no one is in control and no one has the answers, is to try things. A lot of small-scale experiments, bold, different, even wacky. And then compare notes with each other about what works (and why) and what doesn’t (and why not).

That will allow the successful experiments to spread, virally, and be adapted and improved. Eventually, bottom-up, it will allow us to create decentralized community-based self-managed political, economic, educational, and social systems that actually work well, for each community.

Unlike most ‘leaders’, experimenters are:

• collaborators: they don’t do anything alone
• facilitators and coaches: they help others to learn and discover how to do things better
• demonstrators: more than just communicators, they show how it works and what it means
• ideators: they imagine what’s possible, and tell stories to bring those ideas to life
• innovators: they take those good ideas and realize them, make them real
• researchers: they study what’s been done, in nature, by other cultures and communities, and what’s needed, and spread that knowledge
• connectors: they bring people together who were meant to work together
• model-builders: they design and build something that can be understood, replicated and adapted by others
• founders: they start new things — enterprises, communities, different ways to do important things; they build something new rather than criticizing what exists

That’s what we need. We won’t find it in one or a few people. We have to find it within all of us. To do that we have to give up on ‘leaders’ and take charge of our own lives, collaboratively, as peers. Who’s ‘leading’ in government, in business, in religious and educational and social organizations doesn’t matter.

The power is in all of us.