Category Archives: Cultivating Communities

Social Media for Old Folks? Why Not! Here Is A Case Study

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I have been told that social media isn’t for old folks. So any programme that targets senior citizens, shouldn’t use social media – but should only use the traditional media, i.e. brochures, pamphlets, tv commercials.

Well, I disagree. While the senior citizens may not be savvy in using social media, their children and grandchildren are. Senior citizens can benefit from reverse mentoring and pick up the required social media skills from their younger relatives. And, by doing so, the senior citizens have opportunity to connect and bond with their family members.

Using “Live Well, Age Well” programme as a case study, I’ll describe how social media can benefit programmes targeting the senior citizens.

According to the Council for Third Age (C3A), Live Well, Age Well means wellness in six dimensions: intellectual, physical, social, emotional, vocational, and spiritual. The breadth of Live Well, Age Well programmes necessitates cultivating strong communities of interest and organising engaging events like Active Ageing Carnival.

Using social media, C3A can strengthen these communities, can enrich the senior citizens’ experience and can provide better engagement and motivation in its programmes.

The rising trend of social media usage among American senior citizens, gives reason to believe that more Singaporean senior citizens are using social media. Like USA, Singapore has high internet penetration rate.  Social media provides a new opportunity for C3A, to motivate and engage Singaporean senior citizens.

Getting the senior citizens to learn social media can be challenging. However, this challenge is also an opportunity to improve the senior citizens’ intellectual wellness, since they need to learn a new skill, i.e. social media skill. Furthermore, social media can boost motivation and engagement level in C3A’s Live well, Age well programmes, because:

1. Social media connects the seniors’ activity with that of their family and friends.
The seniors’ participation in C3A programmes becomes visible to their family and friends. When their family and friends “follow” their activities, the seniors become more engaged and motivated to participate in the programmes. In addition, the seniors can keep track of their family and friends’ life and vice-versa – which means, social media can boost the seniors’ social wellness.

2. Social media captures stories and promotes knowledge sharing.
Senior citizens love to tell stories and to share knowledge about their passion or life experience. Social media is the perfect medium to capture these stories / knowledge and to distribute them in the seniors’ social network (family and friends). This provides a new channel for the senior citizen to express their feelings and thoughts – which can boost their emotional wellness, as well as their vocational wellness.

3. Social media provides space for conversation and community-building.
In Social Media, the senior citizens can converse and connect with like-minded peers, whenever it is convenient for them to do so. This extends the peer-support network, so that the seniors can continue to encourage each other through online space. Providing an online space to converse, connect and cultivate communities of interest, could translate to a better spiritual, physical, and vocational wellness.

In short, social media can be used to supplement the C3A’s Live well, Age well programmes so that the senior citizens have higher motivation and engagement. Through social media, they can receive morale support from their family and friends, can capture stories and share knowledge, and can participate online in community of interest discussion.

I hope C3A can seriously consider social media as an additional means to get involvement from the senior citizens’ family members. Thoughts?

KM Is About People. Really? So What?

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Most people understand that “KM is about people”. You don’t have to repeat this over and over again. What you need to do is to explain the meaning of people-based KM. I think the manifestation of “KM is about people” is three-fold: facilitating conversation, cultivating communities, and designing social intranet and user adoption strategy.

I came across this situation many times. KMers rants-and-raves about KM is being hijacked by technologist, and enthusiatically sends a message that sounds like a gospel: “KM is about people”. Wow, what an insight (sarcasm intended). I’m totally not impressed. Here is why.

First of all, everything is about people. Could you name one thing that isn’t about people? Last time I checked, every organisation’s function is about people! From Finance to HR, and from operations to technology, people is the center of every function. This is common sense. It’s not something that we (KMers) should stress mutiple times. Most people get it! They are not dumb. They understand that people is important for organisation.

Second, when you say “KM is about people”, what do you mean? What is the “call to action” that you want to convey? Check out what the KM experts are advocating, and you would find different meaning to “KM is about people”, for e.g. Dave Snowden advocates complexity and decision making; David Gurteen stresses the importance of conversation; David Griffiths talks about talent/human capital management. This is where the problem lies. There are mixed messages beneath the simple truth: “KM is About People”.

Don’t get me wrong. I think KM is about people. Alas, I also think that we fell in love with this message so much so, that we forgot to clarify the “call to action” beneath it. We think people don’t understand what we are saying, when actually they aren’t sure about what we mean. Words are slippery! Same words can carry different meaning to different people.

To succeed, we need to do a better job in translating what do we mean by “KM is about people”. Allow me to share my thought. The call to action should be three-fold:

1. Facilitate Conversations. We need to facilitate conversation – especially the difficult one – so that people can share and capture their knowledge. This means KMers have to be quality conversation facilitators. We have to tell people that they can look for us when they need help in capturing knowledge or in facilitating AAR/Retrospect. We should also organise and moderate Townhall meeting where the top management can have a dialogue with the people.

2. Cultivate Communities. Communities (or Tribes) are natural occurring in any organisation. However without proper intervention, the right communities may not have the resources to produce strategic results. They may not even survive. We need to cultivate communities, that are strategic for the organisation, through a combination of top down and bottom up approach.

  • Top down approach means we work with the top management to identify strategic areas and key people, so that strategic communities can be formed immediately and be visible to the management.
  • while bottom up means we also open to the possibility of people forming communities and producing important knowledge work. Our job is to highlight the deserving communities to the management so that they can get the resources that they need.

3. Design Social Intranet and User Adoption Strategy. KM technology has to be human-centric (this is one of the manifestations of “KM is about people”). That means, we need to have social intranet because it uses social technology. Social technology is a human-centric technology, because it connects people and allows them to promote relevant contents. We also need to have user adoption strategy, i.e. making sure that people use the social technology.

There you go! I have explained my thought about people-based KM. What do you think? What’s your version of people-based KM?

Communities of Practice (CoPs): Benefits and Frequently Asked Questions

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Communities of Practice (CoPs) are informal groups of people who share the same passion or concerns and they interact regularly to deepen their understanding of their domain of interests¹. We know that the presence of CoPs are crucial for any organisation, in order to manage change. Since there are social bonds among the CoPs members, innovative ideas spread and get accepted more quickly².

The proliferation of web 2.0 tools – such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums – also makes CoPs as one of the most easiest KM tool to implement³. Furthermore, CoPs are natural repositories for corporate knowledge / memory†, and help to connect people who seek knowledge (buyer) to people who have the knowledge (seller). Thus, it is easy to see CoPs as the heart of any Knowledge Management initiative.

Though every KM professional – like us – is familiar with the concept and benefits of CoPs, we still having hard times convincing our colleagues and superiors on the value of cultivating CoPs in the organisation. While there are no easy way to persuade the management to manage CoPs, we still need to familiarise ourselves with several frequently asked questions on CoPs.

Q: what is the difference between CoPs and teams / other work units?
A: There are many differences between the two. Three prominent differences are: (1) CoPs’ focus is on knowledge exchange, while team / work units are centred on completing projects; (2) CoPs’ membership is voluntary, while team / work units are nominated; (3) Unlike team / work units, CoPs members’ roles and responsibilities are dynamic.

Q: Since participation in CoPs is on voluntary basis, why does the management need to manage CoPs?
A: CoPs exist in any organisation whether they are managed by the management or not. However, if the management does not provide resources for the CoPs, they may not develop beyond friendship among colleagues. As a result, there would be knowledge silos in the organisation and the CoPs that spring-up may not manage critical corporate knowledge.

Q: How do you initiate CoPs?
A: First, you would need to find CoP Champions – people who are very passionate about a domain of interest, and respected by their colleagues. The CoP Champions would then need to invite potential members to meet. In the first meeting, the members would have to define the CoP domain, vision and CoP main activities. A good way to do so is via Open Space Technology (OST) meeting.

Q: How to persuade people, given their busy schedule, to form a CoP?
A: There is little need to persuade people to form a CoP. It is a human nature, wanting to discuss your problems with your fellow colleagues whom you trust. By sharing and discussing common problems regularly, you are essentially part of a CoP whether you realize it or not. An important point to remember is that whenever someone tells you that they do not have time for CoP, it means that you have not identified the correct domain of the CoP.

A note from APQC Best Practice Report 2008:
CoPs are one of the most easiest KM tools (3.8 / 5.0)

References:
1. Wenger, E., Mcdermott, R., and Snyder, W.M. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice. Harvard Business School Press.
2. Gladwell, M. (2002).  The Tipping Point. Back Bay: London.
3. (2008). The Role of Evolving Technologies: Accelerating Collaboration And Knowledge Transfer. APQC Best Practice Report.
† Storck, J., & Lesser, E.L. (2001). Communities of Practice And Organizational Performance. IBM Systems Journal 40 (4).

What I have Learned from Dr. Etienne Wenger

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Dr Wenger and Me

Dr Wenger and Me

I recently attended a Community of Practice (CoP) Masterclass by Dr. Etienne Wenger on 12 August 2009, at Grand Hyatt, Singapore. It was held just before the two-day KM Singapore 2009 themed “Knowledge Workforce – Knowledge Economy”, organised by information and Knowledge Management Society (iKMS). I learned a great deal from Dr. Wenger, not just about CoP but also about Knowledge Management in general. Here are some key takeaways:

On Knowledge Management

Dr. Wenger highlighted two issues of Knowledge Management (KM):

1. There is a lack of strategic conversation. Strategic conversation, according to Dr. Wenger, is conversation that revolves around two key questions: (1) “What are the capabilities that we need to be good at?”; (2)”Who needs to have these capabilities?”

2. There is insufficient attention given to KM at strategic level. Dr. Wenger was in the opinion that organisations shouldn’t operationalise KM, because the value of KM is at strategic level.

He opined that uncooperative middle managers were part of KM issues that the senior management needed to resolve. It was absurd for the senior management to leave the entire KM work responsibilities to the junior management.

On CoP and its measurement

Dr. Wenger believes that although CoP has indirect relationship to organisational performance, organisations should always try to link CoP with performance management. While justifying CoP’s ROI is a struggle, organisations implementing CoP should have a reasonable estimate to justify CoP.

On Starting CoP

Dr. Wenger mentioned that he noticed an increasing trend of CoP that started from bottom-up and top-bottom at the same time. One of the reasons of CoP starting from bottom-up and top-bottom was to avoid issues that each approach brought. The problem with bottom-up approach is lack of management support, which translates into lack of resources such as time, manpower, fund. While the issue with top-bottom approach is the tendency to over-manage CoP using numbers (KPIs) that could stifle the CoP development.

On Keeping CoP Alive

Dr. Wenger opined that there was a need to maintain candidness when members of a CoP share knowledge. He noted that some CoPs have no manager-level participants, a condition which allowed candid knowledge exchange among the members. He mentioned that the practice of CoP was the one that drawn people together to form a community. The practice itself became the curriculum that set the CoP direction.

He further shared that CoP required Sponsors – someone who possessed sufficient authority (power) to advocate and drive the KM initiative across departments and divisions. Sponsors were usually more than one people at different levels of management, who had the right amount of influence to manage KM.

He cautioned the audience not to encourage participation in a CoP that was caused by geographic, gender, or other things that were external to their relationship with knowledge domain. He also urged the audience to give the CoP’s peripheral group a chance to hold CoP leadership.

Q & A with Dr. Etienne Wenger

Q: What if the subject matter expert is not willing or does not have time for CoP?

A: You may need to find a junior person, who is interested to do the actual work of community facilitation, but this person needs to be endorsed by the senior person, otherwise nobody wants to join the junior person.

Q: How to best launch a CoP?

A: First, talk and find out what worries the operational managers. Second, find a community leader. This community leaders need to have two characteristics: (a) this person has wide personal network; (b) this person has legitimacy. Third, Make strategic argument and connect it with the organisation’s strategy. For example: CoP is one of the way to develop the organisation’s strategic capabilities.

To ensure we didn’t leave out any details when we planned to initiate a CoP, Dr. Wenger recommended to use the community-design template:

Key issues Why important Key activities Purpose / outcomes
. . . .

For more information on CoP, you can check Dr. Wenger’s website or read his books. I personally enjoyed his second book, “Cultivating Communities of Practice“.