How Pacquiao Could Counter-Punch Bad PR Using IA

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Roan Yong

Manny Pacquiao, the eight time boxing champion in different class, was forced to defend himself for his stance on “gay marriage” issue. He emphasises that he is not against gay people (or gay behaviors for this matter) – but he is against gay marriage, a view that reiterates his Catholics faith.

Poor Manny! He is just a nice guy who is caught in between a horrible journalism and Catholics faith. He could have ducked this whole mess, if he exploit the different understanding that people have on gay marriage and re-define the term in his favor.

How Social Media Could Create PR Nightmare

What a PR mess that Pacquiao got himself into. This is one of the dark-sides of the internet / social media, i.e. the power to create PR havoc. All it takes to “light the fuse”, is to extract the (negative) emotional element out of its context, and spread it across multiple social-media channels like Twitter and Facebook.

That’s why I’m not so surprised when I learn that the recent Ferrari crash incident – involving a successful foreigner from China and a Singaporean cabby – was turned into an anti-immigrant rhetoric. Emotion can be made viral. Hard facts can’t.

During the interview, Pacquiao did not mention about the infamous verse (Leviticus 20:13) that implies gays must be killed. What Pacquiao did, was simply saying that gay marriage shouldn’t be allowed. Isn’t Pacquiao entitled to his opinion just like the rest of us? Has being religious become out-of-fashion in modern society?

Thankfully for Pacquiao, he did a damage control. He clarified his statements publicly. I think bringing the context back to the (misquoted) statement is the smart thing to do when you find yourself in similar situation like Pacquiao’s.

Pacquiao could do better if he understand the discipline of Information Architecture (IA).

Gay Marriage Is a Wrong Term. Civil Union Is The Right One.

Same-Sex Union Can't Be Labelled "Marriage"

Andy Ho argued that gay marriage should be called “Civil Union”. (Source: The Straits Times, 19 May 2012)

At the heart of the uproar, is the different perspectives about the term “gay marriage”. Some people see gay marriage as an equivalent to the traditional marriage between a man and a woman. Some people like Andy Ho from Straits Times and I, opine that gay marriage is equal to a civil union.

The different understanding about a term can cause confusion, disagreement, and frustration. If you ask me, whether I support gay marriage, I would say no (I’m not a gay-hater. I just think that there is no such thing as gay marriage). But if you ask me, whether I support a civil union between people of the same gender, then I would say yes.

Why my responses are different for issues that are seemingly similar? Well, I’m not alone in this contradictory behavior. Words are multi-faceted and thus are slippery. Thus, when people from different background collaborate, there are always frictions caused by the different understanding from the same words.

Yet, words can be used to unite people. To facilitate collaboration and co-creation, people must have the same understanding on commonly used words/terminology. This can be achieved in two ways. First through strong culture. Second through IA study, i.e. call a meeting, get people to do card-sorting exercises, and then decide on the right terms to use.

Back to Pacquiao. To minimise the PR damage and to project a positive image of himself as an intellect, he could have said, “I support civil union between gays/lesbians – but not gay marriage. Marriage is sanctioned by god to be the union between a man and a woman.”

The above extrapolated statement is powerful because he will not be seen as a gay-hater (the statement clearly said that he support a civil union) and he can defend his Catholics belief at the same time.

Indeed, clearly defining terms could save you from a PR nightmare, could salvage relationships, and could win over people. Information architect to the rescue!

Thoughts?

Want Success in KM? Hire Four Experts

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Roan Yong

: taken from stock.xchng. Courtesy of Asifthebes.

If you have talented technologist, facillitator, content strategist, and taxonomist in your KM team, then you have what it takes to run world-class KM initiatives in the organisation. Your KM team is poised for success.

Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives involves dealing with organisational change, managing (social) intranet, and facilitating quality conversation. And its benefit is largely tacit, and therefore you need to communicate clearly the “What’s In It For Me” to influence people to adopt KM as part of their work.

In other words, KM work is largely unstructured. There are no fixed methodology or step-by-step way that can guarantee success in KM. Your team needs to understand the organisation’s culture and how things get done. And your team needs to be flexible and creative in their approach to promote KM. Being “high-handed” will alienate people and doom your KM initiatives.

Given its complex nature, KM can’t be managed by one person. You need a team to run KM in the organisation – no matter big or small. The ideal KM team size is about 3 – 4 people. This size is, by the way, the average KM team size in Singapore public agencies. I believe large MNCs have similar team size for KM.

But why is it that some KM teams perform better than the rest? I don’t buy into the cliche answer: some KM teams have better teamwork and their team members are “team-player”. Those who believe in this textbook answer must be some greenhorns who have just graduated from university.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the virtue of teamwork. I do. However, I think we have to go deeper than just sticking a label of “good teamwork” to every successful team we’ve seen. Why the team can “click”? What makes the team members want to collaborate with one another?

The answer to those questions, I believe, is the team members have complimentary skills. Because each team member can’t deal with the complex KM work alone, this person has to collaborate with others who can add-value to the person’s effort.

Skill specialisation drives collaboration. People can’t master every-skills they need to make complex task like KM, a success. Malcolm Gladwell said 10,000 hours (approx. 8 – 10 years) is required to master one skill. So KM team members have to collaborate (join their unique skills) to succeed.

You need the following four experts to run successful KM initiatives:

Technologist. Though KM is not about technology, KM needs to be facilitated by technology. Most KM efforts are driven through intranet, so you need technologist to advise the team on social collaboration and on managing information, documents, and records in intranet.
Facilitator. KM is about people, so you need facilitator to facilitate face-to-face conversations. Quality conversations require facilitation. Facilitator can also help in organising learning-and-sharing events in the organisation, like barcamps, unconferences.
Content Strategist (Chief Content Officer). This person has two main roles: (1) to communicate the benefits of KM through interesting posters / e-posters, presentation, blogs, or newsletter; (2) to strategise content lifecycle in the intranet. This involves giving advice on content publishing in the intranet, and writing some intranet contents.
Taxonomist (Corporate Librarian). This role seems to be the most uninteresting of the four. But it is equally important. Someone has to govern the records, and to manage metadata in the intranet. Without well-managed metadata, your intranet search engine will cough-out lots of junk contents.

I know we can’t always choose who we want to work with in a team. But, people come-and-go in any organisation. When some team members left, you’d have opportunity to re-balance your team mix. Make sure the KM team has the four expertise mentioned above.

Does your team have the right mix? What are some challenges that your team has when working together? Share your experience in the comment box below.

Why Smart Organisations Use Social Intranet

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Roan Yong

To win in today’s business competition, you need a social intranet. I’m dead serious. The future belongs to organisations who can use the power of social intranet for employee engagement, productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

Yep, practically all the things that the management wants. So what is this social intranet? Social intranet is an intranet with social technology tools like social networking, blog, discussion forum, comment box, wikis, etc.

If this sounds like social media stuff, it is! Social intranet is about using social media within the organisation. There is a subtle difference between social technology and social media. Social media is usually referring to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or any other web 2.0 tools in the internet. Social technology, on the other hand, is a more generic terms that cover the whole array of web 2.0 tools in internet and in intranet.

Smart organisations are investing in social intranet rather than simply allowing the use of social media in the organisation (I know it is difficult to stop people from using social media at work, thanks to the ubiquitous iphone and other smart-phone devices).

Here is why. Employees can make use of their free time to share ideas and to connect with their colleagues in social intranet – rather than in social-media sites. The big idea is, to contain the sharing of ideas and social networking within the organisation.

Why not use social media? Social media isn’t ideal because people can ”inadvertently” share sensitive information to the public. And it is impossible to link employees’ social activities in social media to the benefit of the organisation.

I know what you are thinking. You are probably going to criticise me for not embracing the concept of Open Innovation, i.e. collectively innovate through idea-sharing with the public, competitors, amateurs, etc. I gotta tell you this: I’m an advocate and ardent believer of open innovation. Yes, I’m.

But, I’m also a very practical person. I don’t think organisations can entirely open-up their business processes, or can crowdsource strategic decision-making to outsiders. Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing can be used in situations where the organisation is exploring something new that it has no expertise in.

Okay, enough of open innovation and crowdsourcing. Let’s get back to our discussion on using social intranet in organisations.

With social intranet, you can:

Increase employee engagement. Work is no longer boring, when part of your work is to pursue your professional interest/passion, and to build your personal brand within the corporate intranet. Plus, you get the chance to connect with cool people in the organisation (people who have similar interests with you).
Increase productivity. Looking for corporate information or contents owned by your colleagues? Well, it’s going to take awhile if you are using traditional intranet. But with social intranet? Seriously, you can get it within a blink. That’s because in social intranet, contents are tagged using corporate taxonomy and your own tags (social tagging or folksonomy) – which means you can retrieve contents faster by refining your search according to those tags. And if you have a very good social intranet like Sharepoint 2010 (Too bad microsoft don’t pay me for endorsing their hot-selling product), you can search contents based on social distance, i.e. your “friends’ contents” get prioritised in the search engine. So, you can jump straight to contents authored by people whom you trust.
Improve social collaboration. It’s hard to collaborate using email, because you are often get confused on which version is the latest and on whether the document has been vetted by the bosses. In social intranet, you can use collaboration space as one-stop centre for collaboration. You and your co-workers can add, edit, amend, or delete contents at easy because every changes made is recorded. You know which version is latest in collaboration space. Plus, you can create a workflow to route documents for approval.
Increase innovation. In social intranet, cultivating communities of practice (CoP) is easy. Employees have more opportunities to find like-minded colleagues and to start building a community around a shared-passion. When employees have supportive-environment (the CoP) and the means to experiment with their ideas, there will be more innovations in the organisations.

Does your organisation use social intranet? Tell me whether it has made an impact to your work or how it has benefited the organisation.

Further Readings:

Hinchcliffe, D. (2010). Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change. ZDNet.
Ward, T. (2010). The Rise of Intranet 2.0: The Social Intranet. CMSWire.
Berg, O. (2010). The business case for social intranets.
Lupfer, E. (2010). Creating a Social Intranet where Employees can Learn, Plan and Do

What is Knowledge Management (KM)?

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Roan Yong

Okay, here we go again, let’s talk about a difficult term – Knowledge Management. Since its early launch around mid-1990s, many people are excited over a new muti-disciplinary subject called Knowledge Management (KM). So what is KM? This seemingly simple question has left many consultants, lecturers, and knowledge managers – lost for words. KM, according to the conventional wisdom, is about sending the right information to the right person at the right time. Surely if organisations are able to achieve this, productivity will go up and innovation cycle will be shorten. But before we get excited about the possibilities of what ‘sending-the-right-information-to-the-right-person-at-the-right-time’ can achieve, we need to think what it means and whether it represents KM as a whole.

There is a need to distinguish between information and knowledge here. Information is something that can be transferred from person to person without losing its context. For example: research paper on smoking is stored in C drive, the HIV patients in Singapore are x people. Knowledge, on the other hand, is deeply embedded in context, and therefore it is difficult to transfer from person to person without losing some of its context. In short, knowledge is situation-specific. For example: showing gory pictures of lung cancer can encourage people to give up smoking. This ‘knowledge’ may work on certain circumstances or people, but it can’t be applied universally. We need to get the context of the knowledge so that we know how to apply it.

With the help of technology, ‘sending-the-right-information-to-the-right-person-at-the-right-time’ can be achieved. Recent development in taxonomy, folksonomy, and metadata shows that technology can ‘push’ relevant information to the person who needs it, provided they tag the information. On the contrary, ‘sending-the-right-knowledge-to-the-right-person-at-the-right-time’ is difficult to achieve, because as mentioned above, knowledge is deeply embedded in its context. It follows that the right knowledge for one person may not be the case for another. Each individual has different beliefs, values, and assumptions that make it difficult to see what is the right knowledge and when to apply it at the right time. Culture and decision making bias distort facts, and thus influence how a person applies ‘the-right-knowledge-at-the-right-time’.

KM is about ‘sending-the-right-information-to-the-right-person-at-the-right-time’, as much as ‘sending-the-right-knowledge-to-the-right-person-at-the-right-time’. The implications are:

KM involves designing and tagging information so that people can find the relevant one. Thus, knowledge managers need to develop corporate taxonomy / metadata, and ensure that the information is presented in user-friendly manner, so that people can quickly sum-up what the information is about. When information is shared, people can talk with one another about it. When people talk about the same information, they can create, transfer, and reuse knowledge – the three KM processes (see below for more details) – more easily since they have a common ground to (at least) begin the conversation. To put this in analogy, shared information is an entry ticket to KM.
KM involves keeping culture functional in its environment and minimising decision making bias. Culture and decision making are inter-related. Culture is shared tacit assumptions of ‘how-things-work-around-here’. It is a result of interaction between the organisation and the environment where it operates. Overtime certain elements of corporate culture may become dysfunctional and disrupt the staff ability to apply ‘the-right-knowledge-at-the right-time’. For example: Bush administration’s decision to relocate critical resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, gives Taliban a breathing space and allows them to regroup. Bush administration was certainly not applying ‘the-right-knowledge-at-the-right-time’. Though cultivating functional culture can help to reduce decision making bias, culture can also magnify decision making bias. For example: the US government’s decision to cut spending during the great depression in 1929 felt right at that time, but on retrospect, it was a bad decision, the government should spend, instead of save, to revive the economy. The US government was influenced by the ‘we-should-save-during-hard-time’ culture then. So how can we minimise decision making bias? there is no ‘perfect’ answer. Nevertheless, tapping ‘wisdom-of-the-crowd’ can help greatly.

So how can we implement KM? by running its’ three processes:

Create knowledge. This means new knowledge are created in the organisation. How can one create new knowledge? through conversations where ideas are exchanged and people can built on other’s idea. You can also create new knowledge by applying existing knowledge in a new context. For example: The Chile government, looking for ways to save their trapped miners, asks NASA for survival tips. The Chile government is applying ‘survival’ knowledge from outer space (original context) to underground mine (new context).
Transfer knowledge. This means knowledge are shared / transferred in the organisations. Note that knowledge can’t be shared by simply sharing documents. It has to be shared through stories or other medium where knowledge buyer can see the knowledge context – or clarify with the knowledge seller directly. So, conversation and/or observation are also good ways of sharing / transferring knowledge.
Re-use knowledge. To be able to ‘re-use’ knowledge, we need to be able to get ‘the-right-information-at-the-right-time’ so that we can use the relevant information, and apply the knowledge either in the same context or in the new context (where new knowledge is created). It also involves good decision making so that we can apply ‘the-right-knowledge-at-the-right-time’. Hence, we have to not only converse with diverse people, but also be aware of decision making bias and be able to tap into ‘wisdom-of-the-crowd’.

That’s how I see KM. See the picture below for illustration.

What do you think? Feel free to comment.

The Side-Effect of Storytelling in a Complex Domain

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Roan Yong

Many Knowledge Management (KM) experts have been singing praises on the “forgotten” ancient technique, the storytelling. They argued that stories are able to capture the context of knowledge and thus they are effective medium for storing and transferring knowledge, especially tacit knowledge. They presented their case through evidence from the past when human have not developed writing, knowledge is preserved and distributed from one generation to the next via stories. Due to this reason, there is revival of interest in storytelling to persuade, influence, and inform.

While I agree that storytelling is a powerful KM tool, stories are not born equal and they need to be managed differently if we were to exploit the power of storytelling. There are two categories of stories. First is the story within a clearly defined domain. For example: the story of global warming by a former US vice president – Al Gore, the story of how Obama won the US presidency.

Second, the story within a complex domain. For example: the stories in the Christians’ Holy Bible. Every Christian knows that the Holy Bible is full of stories, from the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, to the story of the Dragon and the Woman in Revelation. We also know that there are implicit messages (knowledge) behind every story in the bible, and all of them are still applicable today. The stories in the Holy Bible are able to preserve the context of knowledge, which gives us cues to apply the knowledge in today’s situation.

Let’s examine the second point further. In a complex domain like religion, the property of stories that enables them to capture the richness of knowledge in its context, also results in multiple interpretations. While we would want diverse perspectives to encourage innovation and create new knowledge, multiple views could be divisive, creating knowledge silos that compete with one another. This is evident in the various and ever-growing Christians denominations – each with their own understanding of the Holy Bible.

Christianity depicts the side-effect of storytelling in a complex domain, the issue of ‘lost in translation’: as complex stories were told from one person to another, an additional context or interpretation may be added by the storyteller, which either make the story richer or dilute the message. In 325 AD, the first council of Nicaea was convened to attain consensus to create unity of beliefs among Christians, resulting in the Creed of Nicaea. It was basically an attempt to resolve taxonomy issues.

As complex stories were told from one person to another, an additional context or interpretation may be added by the storyteller, which either make the story richer or dilute the message

Much of the debate hinged on the difference between being “born” or “created” and being “begotten”. Arians saw these as the same; followers of Alexander did not. Indeed, the exact meaning of many of the words used in the debates at Nicaea were still unclear to speakers of other languages. Greek words like “essence” (ousia), “substance” (hypostasis), “nature” (physis), “person” (prosopon) bore a variety of meanings drawn from pre-Christian philosophers, which could not but entail misunderstandings until they were cleared up. The word homoousia, in particular, was initially disliked by many bishops because of its associations with Gnostic heretics (who used it in their theology), and because it had been condemned at the 264–268 Synods of Antioch (Source: Wikipedia).

As we probe further into storytelling in Christendom, we find that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John – each of them can be seen as a storyteller – described Jesus Christ in different manner. It shows that they make sense of the story of Jesus Christ in their own context (understanding), and thus adding additional context into the original story, before they transfer their knowledge either through writings or tutelage.

Much of the debate hinged on the difference between being “born” or “created” and being “begotten”. Arians saw these as the same; followers of Alexander did not

There is a need to point out, however, that the majority of stories in the Holy Bible is opaque – full of symbols, metaphors, and meanings. The complex domain, Christianity, is exacerbated by lost meanings due to the process of language translation, i.e. from greek to other languages and the fact that no living authors to clarify the stories recorded in the Holy Bible. This breeds different, and potentially divisive, interpretations.

It is clear that storytelling in a complex domain needs to be managed through taxonomic interference – one that builds common ground and allows for group sense-making. Failure to do so, may results in knowledge silos – partial knowledge that could potentially misguided the knowledge seeker.

Interestingly, even though the Holy Bible did not offer explicit solution to this issue, we can learn from the existence of the first and second councils of Nicaea. Both councils of Nicaea – attended by the majority of the Bishops on each era – were essentially sense-making activities intended to build common ground, i.e. resolve the differences in the Christian belief understanding. Furthermore, it worth noted that although the Bishops defined a clear boundary on the principles of Christianity, they did not produce stifling guidelines.

The Creed of Nicaea offers a clear, but not too restrictive, taxonomic guidelines that provide sufficient common ground to allow knowledge transfer and act as boundary spanning object to cultivate new insights. It leaves enough space for multiple perspectives, i.e. the major Christians denominations like Presbyterian, Charismatics, 7th Day Adventist, and yet filters teachings that were considered heretics like gnostic teachings. Modern business storytellers could take cues – flexibility and clarity – from the creed of nicaea, and it should guide them when telling stories, especially the ones in a complex domain.

Taken From:

http://knol.google.com/k/roan-yong/the-side-effect-of-storytelling-in-a/nbu9ff6arnvc/1