Information Pyramids: Actionable Information

Information Pyramids are a concept that Ron Weisenburger invented in 2002 when he was working with forage and beef cattle researchers in Agriculture Canada and the western provinces in Canada.

This article explains information architecture design for websites that need to guide customers to best information, current best practice and detailed information in a way that does not result in information glut and over-reliance on search. Foragebeef.ca and landuseKN.ca are two websites that are structured on Information pyramids.  

Ron's challenge was that some of the researchers were about to retire. Concerned about keeping really good information visible for ranchers and cow-calf producers in the Canadian western prairies, the researchers wanted a website that summarized the best information they had on different issues on growing grass and hay and raising beef cows and calves.

As the Chief Knowledge Officer for Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, Ron Weisenburger's invention was to propose an information architecture that featured three layers of information on the website.

Layer 1, the top of the information pyramid, is the knowledge nugget or knowledge summary. It is a checklist of issues are immediately relevant to current circumstances. They are the issues a well-informed customer should be paying attention to.  The knowledge summary is actionable information because the community of experts who produce them summarize in a sentence these key actions as:

• What You Should Do
• What You Should Avoid
• What is Coming Over the Horizon

I contend that your value to your organization and your clients is realized when  you regularly produce knowledge summaries that clearly cover these three topics. If you don't, why are you an expert and why would anybody care what you do?

The knowledge summary is a checklist of actionable information

Knowledge summaries are at the core of good advice. And like good advice, they have a "Best Before" date stamp on them. Circumstances change and so should the knowledge summary. You usually don't see knowledge summaries written down (I will say more than I can write down). That makes them even more valuable when they are and when they are regularly updated to stay current with changing circumstances.

Ron Weisenburger's vision was that in the knowledge summary, you could click on a topic you should be paying attention to and get directed to Layer 2, the factsheet that describes "How To" do the current good practice you need to learn more about (or refresh your memory on).

 The factsheet on "How To"

The 3 to 5 page factsheet, that in layman's language explains and illustrates (pictures and graphics are important) what to do step by step, takes a community of experts to develop. It becomes a best practice guide. The most efficient way to develop checklists and factsheets is have someone write the strawdog (it will be about 80% right) and then have the community edit the draft. You will see communities of practitioners (CoPs) do this in wikis. The key is to tailor the factsheet to the level and tools that the target audience uses. With the emergence of mobile devices, shrinking good practice guides down to photos, illustrations and short text makes for in-field guides that reside on the hip and are more accessible than printed guides. Good practices guides are more static than checklists. They tend to have a lifetime of 3 to 5 years before changes in technology or research require updating.



The Details, Layer 3, presents the research articles, manuals, reports and regulatory instructions that are judged most useful by the community of experts. Information pyramids do not cover all the information on a topic, just the most relevant, robustly useful and foundational to the topic. Links from the How To factsheet bring the customer to this level if they need the detailed step by step instruction, the background research that supports the practice or the regulatory details that shape the current good practice.

The Details are the manual, research article, research report or regulatory instructions, standards and codes of practice.

Ron Weisenberger's information pyramid was a revolutionary concept in delivering really good information in a small footprint. The links allow a user to journey down to the material he/she is unfamiliar with. It also provides the opportunity to remind users to pay attention to fundamentals or key learnings they may have forgotten.

A second advantage of information pyramids is that they don't have to deliver all the information on the website. Really good detailed information can reside on other websites (e.g. factsheets or the details (reports, manuals, regulations)) and the information pyramid just links to to that information.

Today, an expert's tweet can be the one sentence line that highlights a currently relevant checklist topic. The blog can be the short introduction to the How To factsheet. And the Details can reside wherever the community of practitioners find access the easiest. Information pyramids are a different twist on the concept of news agregators. The toughest task is getting a community of practitioners to regularly review and update the checklist of currently relevant "Things to Do" today and "Things to Watch Out For".

The concept of information pyramids is introduced at foragebeef.ca
in their section "About Foragebeef.ca". Information pyramids also are a key structural element in the Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network's landuseKN.ca website. The article, "Information Pyramids, Presenting Really Good Information to You" on landuseKN.ca is more detailed on how to construct information pyramids.

At the core of this is a community of practitioners who take on the task of constructing the information pyramid and then weeding and maintaining it. Without their attention, the checklists quickly become out of date. Knowledge requires the active participation of knowledgeable practitioners.

It's About the Design: Knowledge Networks

Dr. Kirby Wright has brought new design concepts to the idea of knowledge networks (the evolution of communities of practice). The practical, visible version of what Kirby is thinking about for knowledge networks can be found at landuseKN.ca.

And you can hear Kirby talk in detail about these new design concepts on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2- 4 pm at 10155-102 Street, Commerce Place, Edmonton, 4th floor, Room 4L. Kirby's presentation launches the Edmonton KM Network's fall seminar series on New Website Design Perspectives to Engage Customers in Knowledge Networks.

Kirby defines the design concepts for knowledge networks in "Website Design Concepts, Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network" and he talks about them in this YouTube video.

landuseKN.ca is the website for the Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network (ALuKN), under the management of the Foothills Research Institute. I work with Kirby Wright in developing the partnerships and creating the connections to actionable information (Kirby's definition of knowledge) for land-use practitioners and policy makers. The Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network helps with effective land use planning, analysis and decision making by:

• Providing access to high-quality, relevant, trusted and accessible information and knowledge resources
• Supporting the many networks, organizations and individuals involved in land use issues
• Providing technologies, resources and information management to land use professionals and organizations
• Facilitating conversations and dialogues to explore land use challenges and issue.

 
In Kirby's introduction, he says: "The key for the ALuKN web presence is to focus on ideas and issues. These ideas are selected because they are topical and relevant. Land-use issues encompass environmental, economic as well as social dimensions; land-use issues are multi-dimensional and varied. To reflect this diversity, the ALuKN site will need to be continually renewed and updated as new issues are introduced and profiled."

I will talk more about our journey into supporting a knowledge network on a very large issue (land-use in Alberta, Canada) that started a year and half ago in March 2011. 

Knowledge Management "Killer" Success Stories

Linked-In has a discussion group for chief knowledge officers. A discussion thread was started on the topic of "killer" stories where knowledge management had created value. The request came from a consultant who was trying to answer the skeptical senior executive's questions about the value of KM. Below is my contribution to the discussion. KM success stories are not widespread these days because high performing organizations have done KM long enough that the practice and the successes are embedded and part of the organizational culture. So I shared what I think are Canada's best examples of KM success stories.

By the end of this, if this sounds like advertising for the Conference Board of Canada's Knowledge Strategy Exchange Network (KSEN) ..... it is. Any organization in Canada serious about KM would get significant value by joining KSEN. I know I did.

The Conference Board of Canada has a KM CoP (Knowledge Strategy Exchange Network) that includes the big four accounting firms, KPMG, Deliotte-Touche, Ernst & Young, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), plus the Bank of Canada, the Auditor General of Canada, Hydro Quebec, the Business Development Bank of Canada and Farm Credit Canada. There are also law firms, various departments of provincial governments and cities involved in the network. The network started in 2001 and with a reorganization in 2003 has supported the exchange of practices and strategy for KM in these organizations in Canada.

As long time practitioners of KM, most of these organizations have significant KM success stories. You don't get continued investment and resources to KM year after year unless senior managers judge that there is value for the organization.

Some of these firms have world class initiatives in KM. For example, Farm Credit Canada has Communities of Practice that evolved to be a key feed of information for strategic planning. Think about it. Who is exploring what is coming over the horizon (for clients, for the practitioners in the CoP, for their organization)? A good CoP will be doing this. The impact of CoPs on executive culture led to a restatement of cultural values and an employee code of conduct. That's just Farm Credit Canada. Hydro Quebec has a deliberate and organizational wide focus on succession management that has driven their KM program. If the deep expert on trouble shooting electricity power line malfunctions leaves the organization, the North American east coast may be at higher risk of a brownout. So Hydro Quebec has had success getting middle managers to pay attention to KM in their work units.

KM is an attribute of high performing organizations and as a result, I doubt that you will find studies that can show definitive rates of return solely to KM. You will also find those high performing organizations paying attention to innovation, project portfolio management, employee recognition, business process improvement, organizational learning and corporate values.

Good organizations consciously do KM (even if they don't call it that). Less effective organizations do KM poorly. But in some fashion they all do KM.
"Killer" KM success stories are out there. But the organizations who are successfully doing KM are not bragging about it because "It is the way we work".

A Conversation about Knowledge Sharing

Conversations can be entertaining or sometimes they are nothing to howl about. You be the judge!


Dr. Kirby Wright teaches a course in Knowledge Management as part of the Master of Arts in Communications and Technology at the University of Alberta. A team of his graduate students approached me for an interview as part of their project in the course. They have created a blog at kmcafe.org. Their blog is well worth a visit for a critical view (in the terms of a critique) of the state and future of knowledge management.

The interview is posted at kmcafe.org. Thanks to Carolyn Dearden for editing the interview down from 40 to 24 minutes. You get the nuggets without the sidetracks I can roam down sometimes.

So, if you are interested in my take on the state of KM, click on "KM Cafe chats with KM Expert Neil MacAlpine".

David Snowden's Seven Principles of Knowledge Management

David Snowden posted an update to his three rules (heuristics) for knowledge management. He has expanded them into seven principles. They are good reminders of the principles of knowledge sharing. They provide a starting point to examine conventional wisdom on how humans learn and share knowledge. Since my experience in KM is that I forgot the essentials on a regular basis, I regularly remind myself to review them.

David's post, from Oct. 10, 2008 is a good place to begin.

His seven principles are:

• Knowledge can only be volunteered not conscripted. (Here is my take on this rule of thumb).

• We only know what we know when we need to know it. (Again here is my take on David's rule of thumb)

• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.

• Everything is fragmented.

• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success

• The way we know things is not the way we report things.

• We always know more than we can say and we will always say more than we can write down. And here is my blog on this essential principle; you can't understand social media without understanding David's principle.
  

You need to read David's posting to get the full value of these principles. Without a regular dialogue on these principles, I find I am bound to repeat my past failures.

Common Myths About Knowledge That Hold Us Back

At the end of our Edmonton Km Network meeting last week, Stu Muir, Tri-Global Solutions, asked a really good question. "What are the common myths (about knowledge management) that are holding us back?"

Some in the earlier posts in this blog address some of the misconceptions that get in the way of encouraging and coaching really good information and know-how sharing. But the diagram above offers up a simplistic and ultimately dangerous model, The Knowledge Hierarchy.

David Snowden challenges this model in his blog "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement". And bless his soul, I have seen where Larry Prusack referenced this hierachy.

Every time I have a conversation about knowledge management, this model usually shows up. I have heard Deputy Ministers and CEOs reference it. It is popular because it is simple and it is dangerous because it is too simplistic. When Peter Drucker introduced the concept of a "knowledge worker", he wasn't thinking that the organization also would move up this hierarchy to become a "Wise Organization".

Data is translated into information. Information moves up to knowledge. Knowledge coupled with experience becomes wisdom.

To see the fallacy of the model, add "management" to the end of each of these words and then ask the question: "Can you actually manage it?"

Data management, yes and for most organizations, absolutely essential. Information management, certainly some information and not easy. Knowledge management, critical knowledge and hard to do. Wisdom Management, who wants the title "Director of Wisdom Management"??

Let's cut to the chase. All your customers and clients are interested in is really good information (that they can use for making a decision). They don't care about your know-how or what you know about. Really the only person who does is your supervisor. But your customers and clients rate your expertise on whether you provide really good information.

Really good information requires the sieve of the expert's know-how. Understand this and then you will start to see where you can help staff and the organization generate and share important information.

Please leave The Knowledge Hierarchy outside the door when you talk to your Executive about knowledge management to improve critical information sharing. While this hierarchy may seem to be helpful in arguing for a knowledge management strategy, remember this. All they are truly interested in is how your initiative will help the organization generate and then share critical, strategic information.

If we must discuss knowledge, recall what we know and don't know. "We don't know what we need to know until we need to know it." That is the challenge for individuals and organizations and no amount of data to information to knowledge to wisdom is going to solve that.

I know more than I can say

And I will say more more than I can write down.

David Snowden's heuristic, rule of thumb, "I know more than I can say and I will say more than I can write down", takes us to 21st century Knowledge Management.

With this rule of thumb, David Snowden solves a long standing debate in knowledge management about “tacit knowledge”, knowledge in people’s heads and “explicit knowledge”, knowledge written down. How do you get the “tacit knowledge” out of people’s heads and into “explicit knowledge” written down in knowledge libraries?

And the social media gurus need to pay attention to this as well because all the talk about chatting, twittering, blogs, wikis, Facebook comes into focus once you understand this rule of thumb about knowledge sharing.

I know more than I can say: What do you know? More that you can say.

And I will say it first and say much more than I can write down.

So where does really good information first emerge? In conversation. And really good information may never get beyond that. What is easier to do? Talk for 5 minutes or write for half an hour?

Everyone I know in knowledge management starts to think, work and support conversation processes. David Snowden moved onto narrative analysis. Dave Pollard defined knowledge management as enabling enriching conversations in a community. David Gurteen is a master of facilitating knowledge cafes.

Why? Because really good information, really important information emerges first in conversation. What do I know? You can't capture all that I know. And I can't get it all out. I would be writing for years and much of it would be useless to the current issue of the day. So what you and I want to capture is really good information (which is transient because it is good only for the current context).

Where does it first emerge? In conversation.

Because "the medium is the message" and the Internet is about connectivity, the tools that are shaping our future are tools about connectivity (enabling conversations). So as you puzzle over the rise of Facebook, Twitter, texting, and blogs, return to David Snowden's heuristic:

"I know more than I can say and I will say more than I can write down".

I know what I know when I need to know it

"I know what I know when I need to know it" is another of David Snowden's heuristics, rules of thumb, about knowledge management.

Even more insightful is David Snowden’s corollary: “I don’t know what I need to know until I need to know it”.

Contrast what you know with what a computer knows about its information. Indexes, directories and lists of files. A computer knows instantly what it knows. Can you image what it would be like to be continuous aware of what you know? Insanity? What we know is more closely related to how this guy knows than to a computer. Malcolm Gladwell leveraged off David Snowden’s rule of thumb to write a book. “Blink” is about instinctual knowledge and how we make decisions and then construct reason trees to justify the decision we arrived at instantaneously because “I know what I know”.

David Snowden’s rule of thumb makes more sense of how we discover what we know (or don’t know) than the more famous and convoluted “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know. ” from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in a 2002 press conference.

Worst of all, there are “unknown knowns” (Donald Rumsfeld missed this one). These are the things that we don’t know that we know, things known by part of the organization but not by the rest. This happens frequently in families, illustrated by the shriek from a teen-age daughter: “I didn’t know that you needed to know that!!”. To our chagrin, this also happens in organizations, sometimes with the same level of consternation and generally identified as a “lack of communication” at a future date during the retrospective.

The problem is that technology and knowledge libraries and frequent communications help but do not solve this problem. This is the way we are wired as primates to know what we know.

As a species, we have been communicating knowledge for a very long time and have gotten very sophisticated about it. Which leads us to the next rule of thumb.

Knowledge is volunteered

And now you know why the words “a culture of trust” always comes up when you start discussing knowledge sharing, communities of practice and innovation.

This kitty won’t be back in your lap for a couple of days.

"Knowledge can only be volunteered, not conscripted". (David Snowden)

This is is one of David Snowden's heuristics, rules of thumb, for knowledge management. David Snowden is one of the gurus of knowledge management and worth paying attention to.

Building relationships, a culture of acknowledgement (giving credit where credit is due) are essential to building trust.

So if you talk about knowledge sharing in an organization long enough, the discussion will inevitably arrive at a statement like "Knowledge sharing is part of our organization's culture" or just as likely "is not".

Follow the conversation further down the lines of why the organizational culture around information sharing works or doesn't and "trust" pops up.

"Culture, trust and communications" all start to appear in the conversation. Why they interplay well in successful organizations and badly in dysfunctional organizations is a function of how well internal communications people and managers understand:

Sharing really good information and know-how requires trust. If the recipient has a history of behaving badly (especially a recent history), trust is low and the expert holding the really good information or know-how does just that. They hold onto the really good information. They will appear to conform if pressured to deliver good information. They can, with justification, deliver the conventional wisdom of the day. They can tell you enough about their work for you to write a detailed job description. In Larry Prusak's words, they "are canny, they will appear to conform".

Meanwhile the organization suffers because really good information does not emerge nor does a real understanding of the expert's know-how reside in the organization. The classic Joni Mitchell truism: "Don't it always seem to go. That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone". And when the expert leaves, you arrive at the succession planning crisis.

So it is about trust. Trust is not given. Trust is earned. And being trust-worthy is where knowledge sharing begins and ends. Internal communications are most often focused on avoiding generating fear. What the focus has to be is what generates trust.

So where there is information sharing issues in an organization, "we don't do a good job of sharing information necessary for our work", is usually a sign that there is also a trust issue to be dealt with as well as information sharing processes and tools. Don't assume that a knowledge management initiative will solve trust issues. That requires an astute facilitator to have a careful conversation with staff and managers about what more trustworthy communications would look like.

At the core of many trust issues around information sharing are recognition issues.

For that reason, a good knowledge management initiative starts by working with human resources to improve employee recognition processes. I spent my first three years in KM on a employee recognition team. It still is one of the most important staff voluntary teams in our organization. The fact that it thrives by recruiting volunteers and not by staff assignment is a vivid illustration of this truism.

So David Snowden's truism explains why the mind dump collected from the departing expert does not work. It explains why reward based contributions to a knowledge library don't work. It explains why some communities of practice work and others are still born.

If you have problems with information sharing and a "culture of trust", start examining what the organization does for recognition and trustworthy communications.

Knowledge Sharing: It's 80% about people and 20% about tools

Ron Weisenburger was the Government of Alberta's first Chief Knowledge Officer. He is the author of the heuristic (rule of thumb) in this blog's title. I had the good fortune to work with Ron for five years in knowledge management. He had the reputation of being one of the "wise men" in the department of agriculture. He also is one of the best networked individuals I have ever met. He has a dazzling I.Q. and a capacity to bring good ideas to cutting edge implementation. He set a bar for knowledge management practitioners that continues to challenge me and others who know Ron. He's retired but still engaged. And he provides advice to organizations that are intelligent enough to listen.

Onto Ron's heuristic: "Knowledge sharing: it's 80% about people and 20% about tools".

It is the first, the primary, the most important guide on what to pay attention to when cultivating knowledge sharing in an organization.

I return to this rule of thumb regularly to review my KM action plan and activities. When I find myself spending too much time down in the weeds making tools work, I know it is time to switch gears. Time to do advocacy, communications and coaching. You don't often find a coach in the office during working hours. And you have to interact with staff to coach knowledge sharing. We never could track down Ron. He was always in someone else's office learning about their information sharing challenges, reminding them of the tools that already existed and then brainstorming with them on how to make the information sharing process and tools work better for them in their work.

Do this and the need to practice elevator speeches to executive team about why knowledge management matters to the organization is reduced.

Ron's heuristic also puts to bed debates about different tools and the debate about the generational war between knowledge management and Social Media. Most of the early innovators in KM would acknowledge that the tools in the early days did not work very well. And most would also acknowledge Marshall McLuhan's: "The medium is the message". So tools do matter.

And if you think we have figured out the implications of the Internet and "connectivity" in the last 10 years, then give your head a shake. Because the reason the "Medium is the message" is because it is the "medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action."

But all the attention and discussion about how tools shape and transform human interactions can lead us away from the essential. Knowledge sharing is a rich, complex human activity. Focus on the people side of knowledge sharing and the tools (and their importance) fall into place.

Now start the conversation again with; "Knowledge sharing: It's 80% about people and 20% about tools".

Tom Davenport rediscovers Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0

In 1998, Tom Davenport and Laurence (Larry) Prusak wrote Working Knowledge. It came to be recognized as the primer for knowledge management a decade ago.

So where do the new Web 2.0 tools, blogs, wikis, tagging, Facebook, fit together with organizational knowledge sharing? Tom Davenport had positioned himself as a skeptic until recently. And yes he blogs on Tom Davenport, the Next Big Thing.

Here's an interview with Tom Davenport: "Talking Social Media with Tom Davenport" (Nov. 12, 2008). Tom's views on knowledge management has always been influenced by his focus on process management (he is responsible for overall management of Babson's College's "Process Management Research Center" ). But he also smart enough to recognize and advocate that innovations also result from knowledge sharing that do not follow along the organization's regular business processes.

Here's Tom's original commentary on the subject from his own blog: "Enterprise 2.0, The New, New Knowledge Management" (Feb. 19, 2008).

In the discussion of "old wine in new bottles", we get back to a foundational heuristic in knowledge management voiced by Ron Weisenburger, ex-Chief Knowledge Officer, Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development:

"Knowledge sharing, it's 80% about people and 20% about tools."

Davenport and Prusak repeat this rule of thumb midway down in this article, "The Knowledge: Tom Davenport". "If you’re spending more than a third of your efforts in KM on the technology, you’re probably neglecting the human side".

So the tools have gotten better. So knowledge sharing is easier to do.

For those trying to organize our companies for effectiveness and efficiency, the messiness of knowledge sharing that the new tools enable is a source of angst. Hence, Tom Davenport's question: "Is Web 2.0 Living on Thin Air" .

But if we listen to Tom Davenport, we recognize the power of the new tools to promote a new wave of knowledge sharing in our organizations. It is noteworthy that the blog interview, "Talking Social Media with Tom Davenport" came from a staff member's blog at SAS (the statistics software company) and was included in their e-mail newsletter.

So what do we do to coach and support our people to help them discover what know-how and really good information they need to share in our organizations?

Rules of Thumb for Knowledge Sharing

Heuristics

Heuristics are useful rules of thumb. Coming from trial and error or experimentation, heuristics succinctly describe key principles without elaborating a model or explanation.

A common one is: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning”. Weather systems in the northern hemisphere generally catch a ride on a jet stream travelling west to east. So, a red sunset at evening indicates a clearing sky to the west; whereas in the morning, a red sunrise indicates a storm system is approaching. Which is easier to remember and captures the essence of knowledge about weather and sailing? The rule of thumb of course.

Knowledge management has its heuristics too. There are five that I keep close. When a KM project heads off the rails, or I need to get back to some first principles:

Here are the five rules of thumb (or common sense) about knowledge and knowledge sharing that I keep rediscovering:

1. Knowledge sharing: It’s 80% about people, 20% about tools.
(from Ron Weisenberger, the first CKO in the Government of Alberta)

2. Knowledge can only ever be volunteered, not conscripted.
(from David Snowden, Cognitive Edge Pte)

3. I only know what I know when I need to know it.
(again from David Snowden). David’s corollary: “I don’t know what I need to know until I need to know it” is just as insightful.

4. I know more than I can say and I will say more than I can write down
(The third rule of thumb from David Snowden)

5. People are canny; they will appear to conform.
(from Larry Prusak)

These heuristics of knowledge frame how we should approach knowledge management. I wish I could offer the links to the models of human behaviour and how humans learn. But in the end, it may be more useful to return to these rules of thumb as we try to navigate the seas of collaboration, innovation and learning in our communities and organizations.

I’ll try to summarize what I’ve learned about these KM rules of thumb next time.

Knowledge Management Essentials: Beginnings

I've been asked to speak at the "Knowledge Management in Public Health" conference, Hamilton, Ontario, Nov. 3, 4. Sponsored by the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools, the conference intends to bring together leaders and change agents in knowledge management and public health. Here's the link to the NCCMT website for information about the conference. Here's the irony. Trained in physics, a practicing engineer, regarded as primarily as a semi-IT person in my organization for collaboration tools and software, I'm speaking in the "culture" stream. How does "culture", knowledge management and I have a good fit? You have to know that I became an engineer so that I could work with people. In 1975, as a farm boy graduating with a physics degree, I went with CUSO to east central Africa, Malawi, to teach high school. I taught lots of geography, mathematics and a bit of science. I also learned lots about third world development, which is mostly rural development and realized that was primarily agricultural development. Yes, roads, schools, hospitals are all important and essential. But economic development was at the core (to provide a tax base to support these other infrastructures) and farmers were the key. Farmers are great for driving an economy. Give them a bit of money and they spend it. I came back to Canada convinced that agricultural development was critical. When a country ignores its agricultural economy, it is on the road to ruin. This includes Canada. So I became an agricultural engineer as the easiest way to leverage my physics degree towards agriculture. As I started to practice agricultural engineering with farmers as clients, I discovered that my exposure to third world development and high school teaching was formative. I was talking to farmers about changing their practices and I was dealing with adult learners, who mostly learn by doing. Change and adult learners. Agricultural land grant universities in the USA and the provincial departments of agriculture in Canada have a rich tradition in developing the theories and practices of adult education, innovation and community development in a practice called "extension". "Extension" and I hit it off. From the viewpoint of practitioners of agricultural extension, knowledge management is just one component of support for adult learning and helping change happen. Successful extension helps with fast learning. The "fast" in fast learning is predicated on acceptance of change. So understanding how people learn fast (the coaching that prepares and supports change by an adult learner) is key to knowledge management. Understanding how you can coach, advocate and influence change in behaviour leads you to the "culture" side of knowledge management. So as an "extension" practitioner, I have spent lots of time thinking about culture and behaviour in knowledge management. What will follow in subsequent blogs is a summary of some of the key points from of my presentation on KM Essentials.

Fast Learning for Adult Learners

This will be a series of columns of what I am learning about "fast learning". It is fundamentally about organizational learning and individual adult learning. But it is driven by today’s challenge of "learn fast" with new tools.

Qualifier: The opinions expressed here are my own and are not reflective of the organizations I work for or belong to.

I work as a knowledge management specialist in the provincial government of Alberta, Canada in its department of agriculture and rural development. Our work fundamentally involves influencing economic development through adult education processes. There is also regulation and risk management support and advice in the financial and environment areas. But whether we are conscious of it or not, we are regularly led back to adult education processes because we are dealing with agricultural business people who are adult learners. Development requires change, change requires learning. How do we learn … fast?

Working with business people in a high-risk environment keeps one focused on keeping it simple and making sure it works. And talking about change and learning with customers also makes it easy to bring it back inside the organization. Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development can rightly claim it is one of the more innovative departments of the government of Alberta. Not because we always do thing right but we are led by our work to pay attention to the "right stuff".

Being a "corporate coach" on knowledge sharing and collaboration gives me a unique perspective on organizational behaviour. I get the corporate view. I can see the innovators at work, their early successes, the emerging new skills and the outline of processes and tools they need. It is then my job to get the early adopters to pay attention, work with me in making the processes and tools simple so the new skills can be learned fast. In an environment of demanding customers, the staff of Alberta Agriculture have no time for me if I cannot make their work easier.

I have also led a couple of volunteer organizations; a pottery guild and the Devon United church and helped a community soccer association. Volunteer organizations are great places to try out new organizational concepts. Stimulation of something different is usually welcome; failure is not as personally threatening and because the scale is small, fixes or abandonment of a bad idea is easier. So I admit that my understanding of organizational learning has been strongly influenced by watching volunteer organizations work. I hope they forgive my experiments.

All this leads to what I think is the core challenge to organizations today. How do they learn fast? A significant component of that challenge is how do their staff, their volunteers (private, public organizations also have "ghost" volunteers), and their customers learn fast?