I started thinking about context a few years ago during graduate studies when I kept reading and hearing things like “context matters” and “it depends on the context.” Of course it does. My own professional experience gave me a keen appreciation of context when working on technology design and adoption problems.

So ok. But exactly what do we mean by “context?” When you ask people to describe the context of some situation, they are clearly including some things while ignoring others. But how do we decide what to include or not include in “The Context” when you are looking at some situation? Whose definition of context are we using here?

So I did some reading and research on how people who think about context actually define it (which actually had a big influence on how I thought about my final graduate thesis work, and what I do and teach today). The result: We should appreciate “context” as a set of specific cues selected by a practitioner or researcher to analyze or understand a situation. Cues tend to fall in a few big buckets — social factors, physical factors (think architecture), time, desired outcomes, etc. But “selected” is the key here. It’s a hypothesis. A way of seeing. A way of creating a coherent story to explain some behavior or outcome. Change one or more of the selected cues and the context suddenly becomes different. (Think about time as one element in setting the context. We look at some organizational practice over a period of weeks. We look at that same practice over a 3-year period and now the context is changed).

I went down this context rabbit hole after listening to David Snowden’s talk this week at #change11 Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. I also shared some thoughts in commentary to Jenny Mackness’s thoughtful blog posts about some of the more interesting bits Snowden shared during the talk, which emerge from his Cynefin framework and work in adapting complexity theory to improve decision making.

Anyone who has heard Snowden knows that he is as entertaining as he is innovative and thought provoking. And during the session he challenged us to question our belief that facilitation techniques can elicit a truly broad and diverse set of ideas. If you really want diversity of ideas you need a process — specifically a process that ritualizes dissent — rather than facilitation, which dampens dissent in favor of convergence.

I know I am oversimplifying the ideas discussed, but Snowden’s point put me in mind of a dialogue I heard at a panel discussion featuring expert practitioners from the design field. Someone in the audience asked the panel how they learned to ‘check their biases at the door’ when observing an environment in the early stages of some design project (trying to understand the context before coming up with potential solution design options). One panelist said they really didn’t/couldn’t check their biases – the solution was to make sure you had different-minded people on your team, doing the observation with you.

Now – that might be more of an interesting practice than a real process, but the idea (I think) is the same. Accept cognitive bias a part of the human condition and build some process work-around to deal with it in situations where you want diversity of ideas.

That lead to the comments/discussion on Mackness’ blog about context. Does the goal of ensuring ample dissent vary by context? For example: Are we talking about decision making, idea generation or some other outcome? (Different outcome goals create different contexts) Open networks or some other structure (my small-team of designers, for example)? And within the structure, what might be important underlying principles of the way we gather together (learner autonomy in MOOC’s, common professional practice in the case of designers)? Each of these questions – my view – is an example of trying to be more explicit about defining cues we look for to define context. Snowden’s Cynefin Framework could be viewed as another aspect of this context-defining: Are we talking about a complex or complicated environment? Chaotic or simple?

In the end, I’m confused. I am continually amazed by the subtleties that thoughtful practitioners pick up as cues that are very likely important to the situation being observed or analyzed — and in many cases, clearly important to the participants involved (my bias is to give higher weight to these). This capability is a really critical skill.

Perhaps what I’m landing on this. We need to agree on the attributes that help us define the context; and there we begin to have a shared framework for understanding. That practice should not change our efforts to continually consider new cues. But let’s define how we define context first.

It is the beginning of the third week of the academic quarter here at the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change and at least two things remain consistent year after year: The winter weather in Chicago and the concepts that (re)capture my attention. The latter is generally more worthwhile dwelling on than the former.

Wenger’s phrase from his chapter in the Blackmore book jumps out as one of those elegant lines that captures something profoundly simple but ultimately complex. And as someone who is both a practicing educator and who focuses on the field of knowledge management, I find this to be one of those anchoring ideas that is worth returning to as a guiding principle in evaluating the work we do. Do we recognize (and acknowledge) the types of things we produce — documents, blog posts, tweets, pictures, videos — as part of a dance designed to creating meaning? Or are we deaf to the music?

As an educator, I am fascinated by how students in my classes create unique paths to discovering something meaningful about the topics we cover. It’s most evident to me in the things that are posted to the online community we create for each course session – the visible artifacts of our knowledge creating efforts. Some students use the micro-blogging feature to essentially take public notes (the Wenger quote above was once such micro-note). Others concentrate on building off of other students’ blog posts – they enrich the dialogue and scaffold off of ideas. Still others share and write thoughtful pieces that can stand on their own or work as starting points for new paths of dialogue. Videos appear in the community about news or people of interest.

It all looks pretty messy at times. But underneath it you can often detect a series of themes or line of thinking, or bits of micro-sense-making. (An example of what I mean by micro-sense-making can be seen in this Google+ conversation on lurking.).

This ability to detect themes and lines-of-thinking is relatively more straightforward in a course setting that allows routine interaction with a common group of people. The challenge that intrigues me, though, as a knowledge management professional, is this: How do we get better at seeing the sense-making dance at 10x, 100x or 1000x the scale of a typical class?

Additional note added 16-Jan: What Wenger’s phrase leads me to wondering is, just what specific types of digital artifacts might be cues to important points in the knowledge sharing/creation process? (And the context here being enterprise knowledge management and collaboration). When we think about trying to measure the value of these E2.0 environments we typically look at participation data (number of people, time spent in digital activity, etc.) or we do some rear-view mirror analysis based on participants telling us stories of where and how they found value.

But – what if we could define and identify specific types of artifacts as indicators of key sense-making moments? What if we could look for the presence of those artifacts as indicators of something valuable happening? Or what if we could design spaces so that these key artifacts stand out a bit more? Wikis provide some insight here; the wiki article is the current state of best-thinking/research, while the discussion and editing functions allow all the messing sense-making and dialogue to happen.

The point is: I just am somewhat unsatisfied in my own practitioner’s capability to look at a large-scale collaboration system and “see” cues of real learning and knowledge-sharing happening — at least in the same way that I can see it on smaller scales. I’m looking for the tools to develop a practice of digital archeology.

In the time I had to do a some reading before the quarter began, I stumbled across a wonderful 2010 piece by Marlene Fiol in the Journal of Management Inquiry: “Acting as if we were new.” In brief it is a call to action for organizational theorists and researchers to act as if the field were new – and thereby expand research conversations and embrace being wrong.

In the article she quotes organizational theorist John Van Maanen, who said (tongue in cheek) during a 2006 speech: “In the long run we will all be dead. In the long run we will all be wrong. A wonderful scholarly career can be had only when the former precedes the latter.” To which Fiol adds her wish: That at the end of her life’s work, much of her research would prove to be wrong most of the time, providing the opportunity to search again.

So here’s to acting as if we were new – no matter what field in which we believe we are expert. Embrace being wrong and the new opportunities to explore.

At one point in his talk, Bates is discussing examples of technology use in academic settings.

“We see some instructors flipping the lectures. So they will record the lecture…and then ask the students to come in afterward. But that hasn’t really changed the model. What I would like to see is a rethinking of the curriculum so you work out very clearly why you need to be in front of the student and what students need to do on the campus that you count as really critical for their learning, and then design around that and do the rest online. That means thinking completely differently about it.”

This is exactly the idea behind the concept of gathering with purpose that I explored in an earlier post. And I am beginning to see the concept as key to driving change in the way we think about technology and learning. Why? One reason: It doesn’t drive an artificial wedge between “online” and face-to-face interactions. It simply forces us to think more deeply about what role each plays.

At the end of the week I had two blinding glimpses of the obvious.

If design is generating a lot of interest as a next next-thing, it is because design is about finding opportunities. It’s positive. Forward-moving. It’s the polar opposite of intractable group gridlock characterized by position-taking and turf-holding.

Spend any time at IDEO’s offices and with IDEO people and you feel the difference. Spend any time with DFA students and their advisors and it’s the same. They believe in their ability to see and find opportunity where others just see problems and gaps. And the thing is: They all understand that designing effective solutions is difficult, challenging work. But they also seem to understand that finding a forward-moving way out begins by hearing and seeing. IDEO’s Human Centered Design process begins with “hear” – a focus on really listening and observing the situation/context in which a challenge exists. Olson coined the phrase outsight during her CIW talk to describe the ability to find a new possibility – a path – in part by getting out in the world. Both IDEO’s “hear” and Olson’s “outsight” are to me rooted in making an authentic attempt to suspend judgment and bias and work very hard, first, to understand. What a concept.

My second blinding glimpse of the obvious relates to the title of this post. In touring IDEO’s offices, one of the things you are struck by is the very physical presence of ideas and insights. This is not just knowledge stored digitally. It’s physical. You work surrounded by ideas posted on walls – informally and formally.

One of IDEOs most interesting ways of expressing insights is via patterns. Here’s how IDEO describes patterns:

“When you’ve got many talented people working on many complex challenges at once, it’s often difficult for the vast amounts of knowledge generated to be shared in any meaningful or useful way.

PATTERNS is one of IDEO’s means to solve for that.

PATTERNS are how we capture and share some of the common insights we see bubbling up across projects, as well as out and about in the world. They are a foundation for intuition. A way to elevate insights to the level of cultural impact. And a way to tap into IDEO’s collective intelligence to do better work for our clients—even faster.” 

At the Chicago office, IDEO has a wall dedicated to one-page versions of patterns submitted by employees. Anyone who has tried to condense complex thinking into tightly designed one-pagers knows how difficult it can be – but also how it helps you think clearly about the challenge. Imagine a wall of these. Then add to that several walls of photographs depicting the exploratory stages of various projects. Large digital displays rotating photographs from IDEO offices worldwide, each intended to share some moment or insight that could create a serendipitous event.

I saw something very similar to this at another creative agency — Upshot — where you literally work among physical and digital displays of ideas and insights.

Now add to this the design process. You seek to understand (hear, outsight). You generate a lot of insights and ideas and use structured methods to capture, categorize and whittle them down into concepts that are feasible. You are connecting and collaborating with a broad group of stakeholders in this whole process. And you are doing it in a physical space where you are surrounded by knowledge and insight represented in physical and digital form. You create a prototype of your concept and learn from it. You share more insights and generate new knowledge. At the end of this whole process you’ve created something that did not exist previously.

That, to me, sounds like a vision for next-generation knowledge management.

I love these events. I learn more than people might imagine. And what I learned last night (or was reminded of) is just how deeply KM practitioners understand the (seemingly) small things about technology adoption that really are big things in the long run.

Let me set some context. I came to the meeting to share some of the insights I’ve gained in the past several years teaching a course called Creating and Sharing Knowledge, part of the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. Insights I shared are summarized at the end of this post. But among the insights I shared, the bits that attracted the most attention were reflections related to successfully nudging people into playing with technology. The kind of play that leads you to learn a new way of doing things.

Three lessons we share from our experience using technology for learning at MSLOC drew attention:

Make emotional connections. This is part technology design and part mindset. The mindset bit is related (in our case) to the instructors of courses, but I think it plays just as well for those people in KM or learning roles in organizations. We characterize it as one element of a “stewardship” mindset in which the instructor consciously shifts from a position focused on controlling the flow of content to one that is concerned with stewarding a path of learning. Key to starting the whole process is establishing a community of learners who feel safe and trust one another. That’s an art, since every class (group) is different from the next. But what you pay attention to is how well that feeling of trust and safety is developing in the very early stages of the course.

The technology design piece of this is something that I have yet to fully understand but seems to hinge on some key elements. Photos is one. We seem to have more success using community/blogging platforms that incorporate member photographs with their posts. And spaces where community members can post photos and videos that may or may not be related to the topic of discussion in the class. The impact, I think, is that people display some real personality. And that sets an environment for members to make emotional connections with each other. Combine that with an instructor who writes/posts in a manner that says “it’s ok to have a personality!” and you’re starting to set an environment where people feel it’s safe to explore and learn.

Gather with purpose. This is one of our stewardship design tenets that always seems to draw the most attention. I suspect it’s because (thank you Keeley Sorokti for the phrase) it captures a positive way to look at a negative thing everyone experiences: Virtual and live meetings tend to suck. What’s the purpose of us being here?

In a technology adoption sense, this tenet really helps to drive a critical behavior among instructors and others who control the design and use of virtual meeting sessions. Can we achieve the same goals asynchronously? Can we push content – somehow – into video, text, etc. so we can use our person-to-person time most effectively? And when we do get together, how best can we really interact with each other in ways that make the experience energizing and useful? We’ve had interesting successes with using Google docs as group white-boards during live sessions. Imagine a scenario where learners gather together, do some “offline” thinking, and then come back together and co-create a single document that captures the entire group’s insights into a topic. You cannot do that in a live face-to-face classroom. But do it well in a virtual session and you get people to look at vanilla technology — Google docs — in a whole new light.

Never leave Beta. I am not the first or only one to bang this drum (see Harold Jarche, who consistently is a great read). But the point I’ve come to is to just never stop experimenting. Ever. If you approach things with that mindset you tend to keep your focus on the right thing: How are we moving forward, overall? And not: Have we reach our adoption goal? Really – who cares? That’s a milestone. Not a mission.

So. Other key themes from the talk. The following summarize the way I might phrase the key insights I hope my students come to appreciate about knowledge in organizational settings. The intent is not to make everyone a knowledge management practitioner, but to develop an true appreciation for knowledge management as a discipline required for organizations to perform well. And in the context of learning and organizational change, I see at least three areas where KM in tightly integrated:

• Strategic change. We know where we want to go. But do we have the know-how to get there?
• The pace of change. Things move so fast that “training” is simply irrelevant. The best approach may be to teach people how to learn; but then we need to provide an environment where they can exercise that new capability (that capability being something like connecting, consuming, creating and contributing – a great framework to describe the process of “collective learning” as proposed by Allison Littlejohn).
• Culture and collaboration. Many organizations see and understand the need to inspire more collaboration – to be more innovative, to solve complex challenges, etc. But do you work on the culture — to architect one that generates natural collaboration — or do you use technology to nudge the organization toward a more collaborative culture? I agree with Jim McGee, who answers that choice with: “Yes.”

The themes we focus on getting to in my class are:

• Knowledge is more than the stuff you can document. It’s stocks and flows. And it’s tacit.
• Expertise has a prerequisite. It’s called experience. (And there are no real shortcuts to developing true expertise).
• Collaboration comes in flavors. Networks, communities, and lots of combo’s.
• “Knowledge runs on the rails of practice.” My favorite line from the work of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.
• Technology changes things. But those things also change technology.
• Never leave Beta. Think prototype. Let the design process guide you.

Image via Wikipedia

This week’s topic in the Change11 MOOC — collective learning — captures my attention because it taps into a long-running conversation I’ve been having (primarily with my colleagues) about re-imagining the practice of learning & development and knowledge management. And along with that: teaching in higher education. It’s timely also because I’ll be talking about some of these same themes at the Oct. 11 meeting of KM Chicago.

Allison Littlejohn’s position paper on collective learning very clearly articulates the dynamics at play, and the questions we (as practitioners and researchers both) need to answer. To summarize Littlejohn:

• Knowledge is becoming increasingly openly available for problem solving and learning. But we don’t have a good understanding of the ‘binding force’ that connects people while they are learning and building knowledge. (I would suggest that binding force is “practice” – in the sense of a common work practice or discipline).
• The view of what constitutes learning is broadening – based in part on the way individuals interact in groups, networks and with technology and explicit artifacts. But we don’t have a clear picture of how knowledge workers learn and how collective learning can improve learning and development in the workplace. (This is where KM and learning practitioners need to collaborate).
• New knowledge practices connecting people and knowledge are emerging. But exactly what new “practices, literacies and mindsets” do individuals need to best learn in this new environment? This is not a trivial question. Each year, we push very intelligent, experienced business professionals into just this kind of scenario in the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change (MSLOC). Learning how to learn in this connected environment is challenging even for adept learners.
• We increasingly rely on networked technologies, but we don’t fully understand how these networked technologies support collective learning. (Again – a great space for KM and learning practitioners to collaborate).

Littlejohn proposes a set of behaviors that learners use to make sense of collective knowledge in this new connected, open environment: connecting, consuming, creating and contributing. It’s a system of behaviors that both uses the network of knowledge resources and can refresh it as well.

I’m really interested in diving a bit deeper into her research (that led to this framework). It tracks well with the observed behaviors we see in some of our technology-supported graduate courses. But more than that – what I find compelling is how her definition of “collective learning” establishes an interesting perspective on the learning landscape, and one that KM, learning and higher ed practitioners can each contribute insight and expertise.

Arrrgh. I hate that term.

And I’d argue it’s done more harm than good in the quest to get learning & development professionals to think more creatively and broadly about learning.

ALL learning is blended. It’s social, it requires applied practice and tapping into all sorts of forms of content. Why can’t we just stop this silly labeling nonsense and just declare that the entire organizational workplace is our learning environment – and that includes all the ‘blend’ of rich activities, connections and technologies that make up the workplace?

I’m done now. Thanks.

Several of my MSLOC colleagues were/are deeply involved in the startup of the program at Northwestern University and its subsequent expansion. Jeanne Olson writes eloquently about that growth in Design for America: Co-Creating with Tomorrow’s Designers (an article also published this week) in Core77. Sami Nerenberg, a designer and currently graduate student at MSLOC, is currently Director of Operations at DFA and has a huge hand in spreading the program to other universities (Cornell’s DFA activities were profiled by Fast Company). Other colleagues have been coaches and advisors, or in the case of alumni Katy Mess, were there in the very beginning making the vision real.

Olson’s Core77 piece offers a great look at the back story of how the program co-creates the learning environment with its students. And the result is not only real know-how about design – but incredible impact on the communities in which the DFA students operate. Anyone who is drawn to the idea that education should start and end with actual practice (doing the work of real practitioners) should study the design and growth of DFA. When students get this excited about their education, we need to pay attention.

This MOOC is impressive. Some 35 weeks of content and thought-leadership, designed (in part) to create a snapshot of the state-of-the-art of technology and learning as it stands in 2011/2012. Fair warning from the designers of this event – Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes – that there is simply more content than any one reasonable human being can digest. And in the orientation to the course there are several thoughtful videos from the three exploring this issue (Cormier’s below).

At this moment, what is most intriguing to me is exactly what will drive my path through the content. As an instructor in a graduate program that provides opportunity for innovation in course design, I’ve had the opportunity to explore “stewarding” students through ideas and concepts and encouraging personal discovery of how these ideas and concepts apply to their professional context. But there is definitely a level of steering still going on.

In the MOOC it is all about choosing your own path. I suspect that I’ll jump onto some topics because of some deep-seated geek-attraction instinct (squirrel!! squirrel!!). But I also know that I’ll be influenced by sharing with my friends at MSLOC (we have already connected on a Google+ circle).

Not sure how my path will be determined. It’ll be emergent for sure. But I’ll be paying attention to how this plays out because I sense it will lead to some interesting insights.