The Corporate Librarian

I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to attend Steve Barth and Richard Marrs‘ session, intrigued by the notion of drawing on cognitive psychology and complexity science for better faster decision-making.

Perception and cognition - the basic cycle for individuals and organizations both is sense –> respond –> change. Degrees of adaptation (learning, innovation) and intention (strategy). Average human can process 11 million bits per second, but is only consciously aware of 16 bits per second. Sense- and decision-making happen at a much higher bandwidth than we realize (before we are consciously aware).

• Working definitions
• Intuition - Knowing or sensing without the use of a conscious rational process (immediate cognition). Tacit knowledge (see below). Often more efficient than proactivity.
• Expertise - Skillfulnes by virtue of possessing special knowledge
• Cognition - Acquisition of knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition or perception
• Culture - Evolving collective assumptions that evolve as people solve internal and external problems.
• Four kinds of knowledge - explicit (codified), tacit (unarticulated knowledge of an individual), implicit (embedded in the group or community), ambient (information which has meaning as soon as you can apprehend it)
• Education + experience = expertise
• Expertise + information = pattern recognition
• Maintaining bandwidth depends on context (language, experience, culture, exformation), trust in yourself, others and power/authority and both context and trust must be built in advanced.

Space and time

• Networks are egocentric (personal), navigated (proximate) and contextual (purposeful). An infinite network is useless for resolving specific problems.
• Must be built in advanced but can’t be defined in advance
• Collaborative innovation network is self-motivated, but shares a collective vision and a goal. It develops around a core group over time which is tightly-linked.
• Knowledge tenses - past (tacit, implicit, explicit), present (inquiry & discovery), future (possible/plausible/probable).
• Pace layers of civilization: nature –> culture –> governance –> infrastructure –> commerce –> fashion and art (Stewart Brand). Fast layers innovate, slow layers stabilize, influence between layers, opportunities are where layers meet.

Truth and beauty

• Knowledge as justified true belief (Max Boisot)
• Possible (options, doesn’t violate laws of physics), probable (objective data convincing to others), plausible (subjective, narrative coherence, if only to the individual)
• Possible (belief) –> Evidence –> Probable –> Actual (through analysis). Managerial mindset. Traditional organizations.
• Possible (belief) –> Intuition –> Plausible (true) –> Actual (through innovation). Entpreneurial mindset. Radical innovation.

Knowledge managers have to identify future concepts which are plausible or probable. Strategy lives in the future (as opposed to tactics and day-to-day operations). However, intuition plays a role in all of these.

• Cone of uncertainty - uncertainty expands the farther out you look.
• Important to be the first one to get it right, take advantage of ambiguity and uncertainty.

Innovation != invention

Adoption velocity S-curve: from innovators –> early adopters –> early majority –> late majority –> laggards. Importance of intuition and collaboration is in those early phases.

Figure out what you need to know and what you think you know, what you know you don’t know, who knows or could know it, what you don’t know you know, what you don’t know you don’t know, what you know and who knows it

Skills and tools:

• Formal and informal networks
• Identification and mapping of purposeful teams and networks so you can stimulate them, facilitate processes, design teams for cognitive diversity and compatible differences, support with infrastructure for knowledge generation (not just capture/archiving)

Implications for KM

• Facilitate present and future
• Differentials in thinking and cognitive diversity
• Manage for intuition and future tense knowledge (ahead of the curve, not on or behind it)

Q&A/Comments:

• How would you start a KM program? (With basic productivity tools to create space, communications tools)
• Issues with entrepreneurial approach in traditional organizations (Change the rules and raise bandwidth between people to deal with intuition more)
• David Snowden thinks strategy is about real-time experimentation in the present, not future-tense. Entrepreneurs who see the world in a different way is not the same as intuition. Key is to introduce different types of evidence.

I gave them my business card so they can email a revised version of the presentation with a reading list, Steve has his own blog and will be guest-blogging on David Snowden’s blog.

Readings:

• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing

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