Building a Knowledge Sharing Community

Why am I trying to establish this?

Having an effective knowledge sharing strategy that my consultants and coaches use effectively can significantly boost the quality of their deliverables on engagements, as their access to knowledge and experiences will be richer. Richer knowledge leads to better decisions which lead to better outcomes blah blah blah.

No really, why?

The truth is far less grandiose. And much more personal. I want better relationships with my colleagues. And the main reason for that is selfish. When I’ve got something interesting/gnarly to solve, I’d MUCH rather solve it collaboratively with someone. I find the ideas that come out of a buzzing pair/trio are generally FAR superior (not just in terms of merit, but also the emotional responses – things like surprise, delight and even just pure joy) than anything I’d come up with on my own. A major contributor to that heightened emotional response is the fact that it’s a shared experience – this has a reinforcing effect on the individuals.

This topic is also related to my post on Courageous Executives – I think being able to create an environment where knowledge and help is shared freely and easily is helpful in establishing a progressive organisational culture.

Some things to consider

The first thing I need, is critical mass. I need enough colleagues with sufficient latent willingness to participate to increase the odds of interesting interactions to occur.

The second thing, is to recognise the reality of the group dynamic. I work for a consulting organisation, and like most others, they staff people on engagements. Those engagements have teams. Back at base though, I’m grouped with a set of similar people under the same line manager. That line manager’s “team” is not a team from a behavioural dynamics perspective, regardless of how the individuals describe themselves. Esther Derby is my go-to source for concise articulation of what it means to be a team.

The third fundamental aspect to consider, is how people participate. The “1/9/90” rule of thumb has been around for over a decade now, potentially longer. A quick recap: For online groups, there are three broad categories of interaction

1% of the population will initiate a discussion thread
9% of the population will actively contribute to discussion threads
90% of the population will lurk

I also reasoned that in order to sell what I wanted people to do, it needed to be more engaging/arresting than just these numbers (which no doubt many of my target audience would have heard already, so there’d be little impact). While daydreaming about how to go about launching this, an idea flitted across my mind, which amused me. I ran with it, just to see how far I could go. Fishing.

Lures: These would be the “1% and 9%” of the population. Their job is to make the environment interesting/appealing enough for the others to participate.
Fish: These are the 90% of the population who lurk. My objective is to convert them into lures by engaging them.

Above all else, the most important thing to remember was that knowledge management was all about people. We have to avoid the temptation to create yet-another-document-repository, as those end up generally being pointless (keeping a stack of documents current is a huge time investment, so very few people do – the documents become outdated quickly and users lose confidence in the repository as a source of relevant information).

How did we start?

The first step was to get a sense of that latent willingness that I needed. To avoid unnecessary confusion, I stuck to a typical technique – I ran a workshop. The stated objective was to understand the key topic areas / themes that as a collective, we had some self-professed expertise in. The exam question was

write down topics, regardless of scale, that you would be happy for a colleague to come to you if they needed some help

Approaching the audience in this way would nudge them into feeling valued from the outset (the alternative would be giving them a candidate set of themes and asking them to sign up. The list at the end of both approaches would be the same, but the first scenario would have far more engaged individuals as they’d own the list). This workshop also let me find co-conspirators.

Then what?

In a word, admin. We had to create a navigable map of the topics that the audience had supplied (it would help people find the right place to ask questions). In the end, we settled on a very basic two-level tree consisting of high-level themes and more detailed topics. That allowed the grouping of individuals to be based on themes with related topics. The main rationale was that as experience and knowledge changed over time, the specifics of the topics would evolve, but the main theme would remain constant. That allowed for stability of membership – and that membership stability is a significant factor in determining whether or not a theme would survive. The candidate themes also had candidate lures – they were the list of people who volunteered for the topics that were under that theme.

We had to sell the themes to the potential lures.

We also had to set some expectations about what being a lure entailed. By this point the term “Theme Guardian” had started to emerge as the role that was to be played. This is what we ended up with.

Guardians own their Theme
Guardians are responsible for the quality and integrity of the Theme’s content
Guardians should invest in PDCA cycles to improve the environment in the Theme.
Guardians need to evolve their vision and strategy for their Theme.
Have “something” to help new joiners understand your Theme.
- This doesn’t necessarily have to be a document. It could be quarterly intro sessions on WebEx (for example).
Set expectations of how you’d like the community to operate – and remind your community regularly

I find analogies very useful as abstraction models to help me understand a domain/problem. In the event that at least some of the candidate guardians operated in a similar manner, I picked a couple of potential models that they could use to refine their thinking about how they wished to operate:

Town Planners and Communal Spaces. What makes some public spaces incredibly successful, and others turn into ghost town?
Aboriginal Storytelling. In particular, explore the claims that the Dreamtime stories have remained intact for over 10,000 years without degrading, despite only having a verbal/pictorial, not written form.

Selling the concept

Now that we had a starting position (themes, candidate guardians, some guardian responsibilities), we needed to launch. To help that, we produced some general use guidance on themes:

People are at the core of any successful knowledge management strategy.
Information held in a person’s head is updated as a by-product of things that person does. Information stored in documents requires additional explicit effort.
For a Theme to be useful, knowledge needs to flow from person to person.
If a Theme’s only got one person who’s interested, it’s not a Theme.
When a question is asked, directly answer. Even if it’s been asked before. Never rely on a document (or link etc.) to answer for you. If necessary, end your answer with “this document/link/other goes further” (or words to that effect).
Think about what your “background radiation” looks like. Themes need to feel active otherwise you won’t get people stopping by and asking questions.
Have a variety in the complexity / subtlety / nuanced nature of the conversations and discussions. For example, if you only have very high brow discussions, you’re likely to put off the inexperienced. If you only have introductory content, then the experts may not participate.

Launch Day

These were our objectives

Start small: We picked one Theme that the co-conspirators were willing to act as Guardians or as participating members. We would attempt to orchestrate and create an active community for that theme.
Momentum: We wanted to create some observer habits in the wider community. With enough people checking in daily (for example), we’d greatly increase the chances that conversations would spark up. But we had to kick start the making-it-worth-everyone’s-time process.
Win over an influential sceptic: Having a known sceptic promote what we were trying to do would help persuade other sceptics that there may be some mileage in investing in this strategy.

What happens/happened next?

1 Week After Launch

There’s a smattering of interest from a handful of people. A few posts have been made and there has been some commenting on posts. Some of the early efforts from the co-conspirators have been around motivating and inspiring the community to participate. There is some optimism around that this approach feels different (probably because it isn’t tools oriented).

Predictions

It’s still early days, but these are my (current) predictions.

1 Month After Launch

The conversation topics broadly split into a handful of themes. Most of the themes appear to be consistent with what emerged from the initial workshop, but the actual topics discussed are quite different. There is some dissonance from the earlier adopters as there are multiple unrelated themes being discussed in the same “place”, causing confusion.

3 Months After Launch

Enough interest in different themes has triggered new spaces on the platform for the conversations about those themes to be segregated, to simplify the cognitive load on the users. There is some frustration from some members who are interested in multiple topics, most likely due to how the individuals have modelled the interactions mentally – e.g. why should two people who are talking about a range of subjects have to keep switching which “chatroom” they converse in. Relationships are still point-to-point.

6 Months After Launch

Most of the theme chatrooms are now dormant, most of the activity has gravitated towards one or two Themes. There’s some blurring between the competing mental models – relationships are person-to-person and person-to-community.

Analysing my predictions

One of the most significant challenges I’ve seen in Knowledge Management things is the belief (usually tacit) that it’s all about the content. I believe it’s all about the relationship, and the knowledge of who to talk to when a person needs to know something. My predictions have a base assumption that Knowledge can be structured and organised at a fine grain. I think that’s an assumption that’s also being made by the majority. I’m expecting this assumption to be proven to be false and that we will pivot back to trying to be more of a community than a knowledge repository. Looking at the population numbers, I don’t believe there’s any need for more than two or possibly three communities (eventually).