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Purple Line Associates

“Learning. Change. By Design.”

August 14, 2010 New How does this help us make sense of our work?

I am becoming more convinced that this question has real value in focusing the attention of small nonprofits on how best to think about knowledge management. And frankly, probably any organization. But the context in which this insight came to light for me is in working with small nonprofits.

Small, growing nonprofits are intriguing to me because many are truly mission-driven, innovative, entrepreneurial and intent on making an impact by changing some system. To survive financially, make an impact on their mission and find their place among all of the other organizations doing good work is a significant challenge. My first hand experience in understanding just how signifcant is in the work I do as a board member of The Talking Farm, a Chicago-area nonprofit focused on facilitating sustainable production and appreciation of locally grown foods in area urban and suburban communities. But through my role teaching a graduate course in knowledge management at Northwestern University, I have also had the opportunity to engage in discussion about knowledge management with a wide range of small or mid-size growing nonprofits.

Often the conversation begins because of a felt need to improve generally how things are shared across the organization, or more specifically about sharing “best practices.” The focus on best practices is particularly interesting to me: How can an organization inventing new ways of doing things in a complex environment even have best practices? (One of my pet peeves, clearly. Let’s first focus on discovering practices that seem to work, and understanding why they do…)

But what the people I speak with often discount is the huge value that comes from dialogue and sense-making — and the fact that they are likely already engaged in very effective practices that help them make sense of their work and the environment in which they operate. They have built tremendous social and professional networks. They meet and share stories routinely. They reach outside of their own arena of practice to learn and discover.

So yes, there are lots of things a KM practitioner might recommend to these nonprofits to help improve their knowledge sharing capabilities. But I think the starting point needs to be establishing a clear understanding of what practices — recognized or not — help them currently make sense of their environment. And then carefully add things to the mix by asking first: How does THIS [new activity or technology] help us make sense of our work?

[For more on this topic of sense-making and KM, and the recent inspiration for my thinking here, see Jack Vinson's Make sense personally and with the group, and the work of Harold Jarche and Luis Suarez as referenced in Luis' recent post on personal knowledge management.]

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July 17, 2010 Taking the stairs

The coffee is kicking in this a.m. and I was struck by the points-of-view represented in two links shared by people I follow on Twitter. I happened to open these links in succession.

The first (shared by KM blogger Jack Vinson) is a thoughtful piece from John Bordeaux of Bordeaux Associates: On Change, or Why They Hate You. The second is a video link shared by Michelle Frisque, who I know as a graduate student in the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. It’s an example of using design (and fun) to change people’s behaviors – in this case, encouraging people to take the stairs rather than an escalator.

Take a look at both. Ok: Now discuss.

July 14, 2010 Greatness = working outside organizational boundaries + advocacy

I’ve just started reading Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (thank you, Leigha Kinnear) by Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant. Among other things I am struck by the methodical approach the authors took to understanding what really makes a difference (impact-wise) in the nonprofit world. Anyone who writes as transparently as Crutchfield and McLeod Grant about methodology is ok by me.

Normally I just tune out of any book/article with “the # practices of high-impact [fill in the blank]” because it’s someone just spewing opinion. But in this case, the research approach appeals to my geeky side. There was some serious thought put behind how (and why) to look deeply at success cases.

What prompts me to write so early in my reading was this item:

Greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. - From Forces for Good, p. 19

First, this resonates with other themes that have struck me (see this post, for example). But it also strikes me because the authors clearly spell out in the warmup to their book that they were underwhelmed by the state of existing research on how social entrepreneurs and successful nonprofits really operate and deliver impact in our current environment (e.g., let’s exclude nonprofits that are working off the momentum initiated by some philanthropic visionary 80-100 years ago). The general approach to looking at nonprofit operations is via the lens of successful commercial enterprises — and really, how satisfying (or applicable) is that?

Basically, the authors say: Successful nonprofits are a different species. We need to look at how they survive within the environment with open eyes, and learn by observing. What I say is, yep. And how about we turn things around: Rather than try to see nonprofits through the lens of “best” commercial enterprise “practices,” how about we look at successful nonprofits and say — this is where all organizations should be headed?

And that brings me back to the “working outside their boundaries” as a focus vs. “internal operations.” Truthfully, there is a shift there that is worth contemplating for any type of  organization. I suspect that the organizational capability to truly collaborate broadly produces residual benefits related to effectively engaging stakeholders and society in general. Just a thought.

The second bit that inspired me to write this is the notion of advocacy. The authors write about successful nonprofits being able to both advocate and serve (in the sense of providing programs and services). What strikes me here is that the key point is about advocating with authenticity. If I am providing programs and services that truly help me understand issues at the ground (user, consumer) level, then who better to advocate for addressing the policy issues that stand in the way of progress?

It’s the difference between spewing opinion and having a thoughtful point of view. We need more of the latter.

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July 11, 2010 From Digital Habitats: Communities and different orientations of learning

I recently finished reading Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith. It’s a gem of a book in large part because of the three authors’ deep expertise in communities-of-practice. But they are also models, in my mind, of what it means to be reflective practitioners. There is much how-to in this book, but the how-too is deeply rooted in why and context.

The book is largely designed to aid practitioners who are the technology stewards for the communities-of-practice they serve. It is filled with very practical tips for stewardship, from selecting or matching the right technologies for the community’s needs, to taking the pulse of the community’s readiness to adopt new technologies, and to managing the change process.

One of the highlights of the book for me is the discussion on the different orientations that communities tend to use for learning together.

Communities learn together in different ways: some meet regularly, some converse online, some work together, some share documents, some develop deep bonds and some are driven by the mission they serve. We say that these communities have different orientations toward the process of learning together. An orientation is a typical pattern of activities and connections through which members experience being a community. - From Digital Habits, p. 69

The authors then go on to define and describe nine different orientations (and these are not mutually exclusive): meetings; open-ended conversations; projects; content; access to expertise; relationships; individual participation; community cultivation; and serving a context (e.g., inside a single organization, cross-organization, public mission, etc.). For each orientation, the authors define community activities that are clues to the orientation; “signs of life” indicating the orientation is healthy; key success factors; questions to consider; and technology implications.

Outside of the attention to detail paid to unpacking these orientations, what I am struck by is how useful these orientations are in providing a language for “what we are seeing” — in the sense of ethnographic observation. One of the challenges that we all deal with in defining how work (or shared interest) activities really get done is in respecting the social, nonlinear, complex, situated nature of the actual practice of these activities. Through these nine orientations, the Digital Habitat authors provide a very workable language for helping to better understand communities-of-practice as the really are, and then to translate that understanding into solutions to ensure the “signs of life” within the community are strong.

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July 8, 2010 Bracketing change: Standards, institutionalized practices and experiments

I have often been in the situation where an organization is keen on sharing or expanding the use of [best] practices or establishing “standards” to improve some type of performance.  I put [best] in brackets because my bias is that “best” is really situational and relative; what is best for one organization may not be replicable across organizations and maybe shouldn’t be replicable. The point is to get at practices that produce positive outcomes and are understood well enough to generate on-going adaptation, learning and improvement within the unique context of the organization in question.

And once you start to peel that onion you begin to see [best] practices as something more dynamic. And frankly, so are standards. So how do we walk the line between stabilizing practices or standards while acknowledging their dynamic nature? Here is an approach I’ve used often. It starts with defining what we mean by standards and [best] practices and adding a third element — experiments — that allows us to mess around, play, and prototype to discover something new and valuable.

Standards. Standards should imply compliance. They are binary. You either meet them or you don’t. And there should be consequences for not meeting them; you can go no further in the process, your work gets sent back, etc. By defining “standard” in this manner you set up a natural filtering system to ensure that anything that is defined as a standard is clearly articulated and is so important that you’d stop a process from proceeding. Compliance requires policing, auditing or tight systems and processes. Those can be expensive things. You want to make sure that each standard is worth the expense.

Institutionalized [best] Practices. I prefer “institutionalized” — even though it’s a bit of an academic concept — because it gets closer to what I think meets the situational nature of practices: things that work in a specific organizational context.

Think about the way in which some organizations have a very specific, well known and effective routine for running meetings. Agendas all follow a particular format; roles are clearly defined; there are signals or common language used to prevent run-on discussions (or to allow productive discussion to continue longer than planned); thought-provoking questions or agenda items encourage reflection and learning; and technology is used intelligently to support archiving, follow-up actions, communications, and on-going collaboration between meetings.

Some parts of this institutionalized meeting practice may be standards (e.g., no meeting begins without a complete agenda). Some parts may be well-worn routine and expected practice. But there is also enough flexibility for individual participants and teams to adapt the practice in ways to meet their specific needs. Bottom line, everyone knows what “holding a meeting at organization x” means. It is an institutionalized practice that integrates people, activities and technology. And further, the organization is set up to support the on-going use of this practice with systems, formal or informal training, coaching, etc.

Experiments. Let’s say that this very effective, institutionalized meeting practice was designed and adapted for face-to-face meetings. Now the organization is moving to situations that require groups of people to meet regularly but from multiple locations – virtually. By conducting experiments with different technologies, practices, roles and routines the organization can create some new “meeting practice” that works effectively in a virtual setting but feels consistent with the important elements of the original face-to-face practice.

My experience suggests that explicitly calling out some new activities as “experiments” frames the activities in the right light: We need to learn from what we do here. And if it fails, well, it was an experiment. What did we learn? (Thanks to collaborator Keeley Sorokti for sharpening this point).

It’s about bracketing change. In almost all cases where we are looking for [best] practices or standards we are looking for ways to improve performance — but we have blinders on regarding the constant state of change that impacts every organization. By framing the problem as defining standards, institutionalized practices and experiments we put brackets around things that each have a different rate of change. Standards are relatively stable; institutionalized practices are somewhat more dynamic; and experiments are free-form play. And we are the ones who decide when things move from one state to the next. Kind of a comforting thought when it comes to change.

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June 13, 2010 Strategic challenge: Learning how to collaborate for social impact

In the days leading up to a strategic planning retreat for The Talking Farm, I have been reflecting on “scale” and “impact” — two concepts often discussed in relation to non-profits or social enterprises. Can we/should we/how might we scale to have greater impact?

This is a particularly relevant issue — in my view — for non-profits like The Talking Farm that operate in an environment characterized by a rich landscape of other non-profits or public organizations working on the same fundamental issue. In this case, it’s the desire to impact the local food system. Dozens of organizations in the Chicago area are addressing food system issues, albeit in different communities and with slightly different approaches or goals. Layer on top of that national organizations such as Slow Food USA or the National Farm-to-School Network, Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, etc. and you begin to see a network of abundant resources.

So is the question really about scaling to achieve greater impact, or being more strategic about learning how to collaborate within a large network of resources? And if it’s the latter, what does that look like, exactly?

I am beginning to think that “what it looks like” is something like strategic hypothesis testing and prototyping. It seems beneficial to first be clear about an operating hypothesis: “Locating a 3-acre, production farm within an urban setting provides a leverage point for food-system issue awareness, education, jobs and new venture development.” But determining how best to collaborate with the larger network of resources — to drive the greatest social impact — also takes a bit of hypothesizing (“what is our most impactful role among the network of resources?”) and then prototyping some thoughtful collaborations with like-minded organizations. Hypothesize > prototype > learn > adapt.

We’ll see if this applies to The Talking Farm’s strategic planning over the next several weeks.

For two excellent pieces exploring the issues around scale and impact for non-profits, I recommend:

Driving Change: It’s not just about size by Sally Osberg, President and CEO of Skoll Foundation (published in the McKinsey & Co. blog What Matters.)

Scaling Impact: How to get 100x the results with 2x the organization by Jeffrey Bradach, cofounder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group (published online in the Stanford Social Innovation Review)

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March 28, 2010 Expertise, practice, policy and value

I have just completed another academic quarter teaching a course (Northwestern University – Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change) that introduces graduate students to a way of seeing knowledge at work within organizational settings. On the Themes page I’ve posted a list of the key concepts and themes that guide the course, but have also included them here.

What this represents is my own mental model for unpacking knowledge sharing and creation challenges faced by an organization. And in teaching it, I’ve found it to be effective in shifting people’s mindsets away from seeing knowledge management as a narrow, tactical, technology-infused specialty. Which is important because the graduate students in my classes include executives and emerging leaders from both the business and not-for-profit worlds. These leaders need to be engaged in thinking about how organizational knowledge impacts performance — and not just delegate it as an issue to be addressed by the IT organization.

The themes below create a lens through which to see organizational knowledge sharing and creation as a system that involves elements incorporating individuals, groups/networks and organizations. I’ve left out one additional theme I use in the course (which I’ll add to the Themes page shortly) regarding “design.” A good design process — observe, visualize, prototype, implement, and then repeat the cycle — is necessary to test out whether your hypothesis of how to address some organizational knowledge issue actually works.

But here are the key themes that provide the starting point:

Experts and expertise (individual perspective). In looking at knowledge sharing and creation, we cannot shortchange the focus on people and the impact of knowledge (know-how, know-what, know-when, know-why) on an individual person’s way of thinking and doing. This may seem like a blinding glimpse of the obvious but shortchanging the focus on people is a trap into which it is easy to fall (e.g., “knowledge management = technology”). We also need to go beyond thinking about the “people” side of knowledge sharing as just getting the right piece of knowledge to an individual at the right time. That’s an important piece, but it puts people in the role of actors in a system, rather than experts who think and do.

Experts develop a personal way-of-thinking based on learning, doing (lots of it) and reflecting. And if we view expertise as something that exists on a relative scale — there are novices and there are experts and all sorts of points in-between — then we begin to see that a key outcome of any knowledge sharing activity is how it contributes to the development of expertise in individuals.

Practice and activities (groups/networks). “Practice” in the sense used here is intended to define how work or organizational activities are actually performed (e.g., “the practice of teaching.”) And in a more subtle way, the concept of practice is also intended to capture the unique nuances of how work or organizational activities are performed in the messy, social, ambiguous, time-constrained context of the real world. Ask anyone you know to tell you how they actually get things done in their job and you’ll begin to hear stories about people they rely on (or don’t); tricks of the trade; tools they use and don’t use; rules they follow and ones they are supposed to but don’t follow; etc.

“Activities” is simply a way of defining some goal-oriented actions taken by a group of people. A social service not-for-profit organization engages in the activity of providing programs to its target consumers, but also in fundraising, in collaborating with other organizations, in advocating, and more. Paired with the concept of “practice,” activities are useful when they are time-bound and outcome-focused. A not-for-profit organization may have some formal fundraising structure and process — but if you begin to look at the “actual practice” of how fundraising is performed by all the people involved in the activity of this year’s annual campaign drive, you begin to see things in the organization as it is “lived” and not just how it is designed.

Policy, structure and process (organization). Practice and activities help us see the “lived organization.” Policy, structure and process make up the “designed organization.” Think about the difference between an organizational chart — titles, roles, reporting structure — and the “hidden organization” underneath the formal structure that can be revealed by social network analysis. The social network analysis reveals who relies on whom as trusted sources of knowledge, with often surprising insights into which individuals have influence well beyond what their formal roles or titles may suggest.

It is understanding the interplay between these elements — the formal policy, structure, process and the informal practice and activities — that is important in improving capabilities in knowledge sharing and creation. Only by continually prototyping or tweaking the formal elements can you learn how they either enable or constrain effective practice; and only by understanding actual practice can you effectively inform the design of new prototypes or tweaks to the “designed” system.

Value (organization). Value is the “why” behind an organization’s existence and provides the strategic rationale for looking at knowledge sharing and creation practices. And in any organization that is focused on creating a positive social impact — whether not-for-profit, for-profit, or social enterprise — we should be able to express “value” as a hypothesis of how the organization’s activities meet that desired goal. Microlending empowers women and improves family well-being. Urban farms improve access to healthy foods. In each of these two statements we begin to understand the hypothesis for generating social value. Knowledge sharing and creation strategy, then, should be tied to improving performance in delivering on these hypotheses.

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September 20, 2009 A designer’s mindset for workplace knowledge creation and sharing

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a the white paper  A Strategic Design Approach to Workplace Learning and Knowledge Development. Since that time, I have continued to develop my thinking around these ideas while teaching in the Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University.

This blog is where I will continue to my work in this area, and the impact this “designer’s mindset” has in projects that I am involved in.

March 18, 2009 Learning to be, vs. learning what

One of the concepts that is capturing my attention more lately is the relationship between identity and learning. Everyone looks to intrinsic motivation to drive new learning — but rarely do people focus on identity as the key. It’s the difference between learning to cook, and learning to be “a cook.”

The reason I am noodling this at the moment is I am working through the best way to help The Talking Farm find a scalable model to do more urban, organic farming in the local area (Evanston and Skokie, IL). I really think there is something in providing people with a motivational identity to achieve — urban organic farmer, apprentice farmer, urban foodie — that has local meaning and cache. More to come…

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December 7, 2008 LEED: The success case worth mining for insight

Worth the review: The Green Building Impact Report.

I’ve just begun a read of this, but am already seeing this as an exemplar case study in large-scale, cross-organizational change. We need a LEED effort for food…for transportation…

What is most fascinating to me (and I need to dive into this further) is the fact that the LEED effort has strong links to a particular profession (or set of related professions) — architecture and the building professions.

One of the things we look at in organizational change is the impact of communities of practice, or networks of practice — those people who share a common language and way of thinking that is associated with a profession. That common ground and interest connects them in a way that is productive, and once there is a change afoot, this community can become a catalyst for it or a barrier to it. So — what makes it work? And why has it worked for architects and builders, but not for — say — automotive engineers? Or farmers?

If I had to hypothesize, I am sure it is the combination of several factors (the structure of the architecture and building industry is not the same as the auto industry or farming, for example).

But underneath this is the question that everyone seems to want to get at. We’ve got lots of parts of industries that “get it” and are moving toward more sustainable practices. What does it take to get real traction, in the sense the kind of productivity and results produced by LEED certification?

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