The in-house "Chief Work Practices Architect" of a client is using Contextual Design to understand project team work practices. The Contextual Design Methodology was developed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer as an outgrowth of their work in Contextual Inquiry, which originated at Digital Equipment. This is where I first learned about contextual inquiry, from Karen, many years ago.

Fundamentally, contextual inquiry (CI)is the method of watching people while they work and asking questions about why they perform particular tasks in a particular way. The dialogue elicits insights into the affordances and flaws of user interfaces and opportunities for improvement.

While at Digital and subsequently in my consulting practice, I have integrated the concepts of CI into my own practice of "contextual interviewing." I always approach interviews by seeking first to understand the context, the work, and how people interact with the artifacts of knowledge around them and with others in seeking to share and transfer knowledge. I also shifted my perspective from thinking and talking about "knowledge processes" to "work practices" as the latter term, to me, gets at closer representation of quotidian tasks in which we use and create knowledge.

My work in contextual inquiry prepared me well for working with Cognitive Edge methods; it is perhaps also why, when I first heard Dave Snowden speak about the his ethnographic studies it resonated so clearly for me. Consider that sitting with people while they work is in fact the way to elicit that elusive "stuff I only know at the moment I need to know it." There are many other similarities -- voluminous collection of data (sense-making) items for categorization and tagging, custom software to support the tagging and retrieval processes for design, the emergence of the intelligence of the group during the categorization and consolidation processes.

Karen and Hugh, in their company InContext, using these contextual methods as the data to go on with the "delivery end" of their work, which is customer-centered product design.

The evidence is mounting. Net work (creating and sustaining networks across internal and external boundaries. The latest research from Harvard Business School, Best Practices of Global Innovators summarizes, in the from of an interview with Alan MacCormack the drivers in the trend of networked partnerships:

• The complexity of products and the sheer impossibility of a single company or enterprise maintaining all the needed skills in house
  
• The availability of lower-cost labor in developing areas of the world
  
• Advances in development tools and infrastructure that support virtual work and global collaboration
  

He goes on to to suggest that success in partnering is more likely when there is a mindset shift, that is to think about building a partnership not just to lower costs, but to develop non-transactional relationships. In other words, to develop a mindset in the organization that is conducive to emergence. In Net Work, I described how networks tend to be oriented either toward outcome or discovery. What I understand now is that this is not an either/or choice. It's a pair of forces that must remain in balance. The organization must be open to emergence.

MacCormack's research also indicates that there are three critical success factors in adopting this new mindset: a strategy, organizational design, and the building of collaborative capacity. For the last of these three, he recommends investment in developing the skill sets required for collaborative, distributed work. This includes staffing for diversity of skills, but would also, I hope, include the focused support to teach people how to create and manage their personal networks. (See Rob Cross's work on this topic. II believe that it makes no sense to assembling partnerships without providing the opportunity for personal transformation of the people who do the work, learning, and innovation.

Over at NetAge's Endless Knots, Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps have are providing a preview of a chapter they've contributed to an upcoming book on High Performance Teams.

They have been developing with a client, a network analysis method that overcomes some of the shortcomings of the standard SNA/ONA method. Instead of using surveys or other methods to determine what linkages exist among people in the informal organization, they asked a very simple question: what if we just did a map of the formal organization? In other words, what could be learned by using a network analysis tool to examine a hierarchy?
The resulting tool, OrgScope, uses a hyperbolic network modeling tool from Inxight, reading data straight out of a corporation's SAP system.

In this project, they supported a manager who was in the process of setting up a completely virtual, matrixed organization in a global company. The OrgScope views helped to answer questions like:

• Did some nodes (people) in the organization have more direct links than others?
  
• Did most managers have an average span of control?
  
• Were certain positions clearly hubs in the network?
  

When the maps were presented to the new management team, can you guess what happened? Questions! (This is the primary point I always make when I give tutorials and workshops in ONA/SNA: "The primary goal is to be able to ask good questions.")

The ultimate result in this case was a reconsideration of the organizational structure with an eye to balancing the number of direct reports at each level. Moreover, after data was added to reflect the matrixed relationships (which are not always recorded), the maps provided insight into the internal communications model -- looking at how information moved across the organization, not just through organizational cascades.

This is another good example of how the network lens -- whichever way you want to look at the network in your organization -- enables action guided by fresh insight.

I attended a really great day long "Technical Information Exchange" at the MITRE corporation yesterday. The topic was knowledge management; speakers included MITRE staff who are working on KM, introducing Web 2.0 tools internally, a number of government speakers. (More on these in another post.)

The invited keynote speaker represented the nonprofit sector. Brook Manville is EVP at United Way, where he directs the Center for Community Leadership I first met (and last saw) Brook (via my colleague Andy Snider at one of Andy's Advanced Thinkers conclaves) in 2003, just as he was starting at the United Way. The task ahead at that time was to guide the transformation of the United Way from a fund-raising organization to a community-based network of local hubs. That transformation is still in progress.

Brook's talk for this day was to set forth his view of the "next generation of KM." His take is that the first generation focused on organizational effectiveness:

• Leveraging assets
  
• Managing what's known, and
  
• Developing disciplined system practices.
  

The current generation is working up its S-curve of discovery, development, and integration toward the power of cross-boundary networks. The forces behind this discontinuous change include the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, global competition, etc. In this generation, we need to manage the boundaries, ecosystems of networks, the democratic engagement of people at all levels in the organization, and to enable the management of the "knowable." (I liked that).

All evolved systems need to accomplish two almost opposite tasks if they are to persist over a long time. First, they must have developed an internal structure of interacting elements that can together do something currently that allows them to pump in the necessary resources (they need a “cash-cow”). Second, in order to survive into the future they must be capable of adapting and transforming the identity and nature of these elements and their emergent capabilities in order to do something new in the changing world (they need to be looking for a NEW “cash-cow”).

The spontaneous emergence of multiple layers of structure and organization in complex systems make exploration and diversity creation inevitable. This is because the forces of selection also only act at the levels of successive “environments”. Providing the aggregate properties of a layer is maintained then the forces and pressures outside it cannot act directly on the interior of the system, spotting “micro-deviants” and novel behaviour and eliminating it if it does not pass some performance test. Because of this protection, then the errors, exploratory behaviors and deviations that occur naturally as a result of the second law will therefore persist for some time, enabling them to explore pathways of behaviour or thought that may initially be of low “fitness” if this could be measured. In order to understand this idea we can think of the fact that as individuals we can think of all sorts of ideas, and providing that we do not speak them, or put them into operation, then we cannot know how good they really are. Indeed the whole idea of setting up a studio or a lab to experiment embodies this idea precisely, since it allows explorations and trials to be made, for ideas that may prove to be initially unpromising, but can be developed further to great success. In reality, even ideas that have been carefully examined, nurtured and financially backed fail in the first few years, so clearly, if success is to eventually emerge from initial thoughts, sudden inspirations, daring or even seemingly mad thoughts then they really need protection for some time. In biology it is the phenotype (the resulting emergent form) that is selected or rejected not the genotype.

Our first contribution to the open period comes from Richard Lalleman who is sharing his dissertation proposal (which uses the Cynefin Framework) with us for comment.

Knowledge management and organisational learning each lack a theory of how cognition happens in human social systems. Complexity theory offers this missing piece and can make a huge contribution to both knowledge management and organisational learning. This dissertation proposal aims to explore and assess the utilisation of the Cynefin framework for leadership to enhance organisational learning processes in cross cultural business contexts.

Our second blog during this open period comes from Hazel Edmunds (The Snowden cousins are all called Edmunds so there may even be a connection) who raises an important political issue with the UK, but almost certainly there are similarities elsewhere in the world.

Well, you did say to write about anything and I've been dwelling over the last few days about the proposed immigration bond.

It seems to me that law-abiding families may well find that £1,000 to guarantee that their relative returns home may be the final straw which means that Granny will never see her grandchildren. However, those concerned less with legality and more with profit will simply pay up, with their victim's money, and get away with it. The victim may, of course, be found and deported -- although given the track record of this present administration this seems unlikely -- but those managing illegal immigration will not be dealt with and will simply move on to the next victim.

In conclusion Hazel an important question

What can people of influence (which isn't me) do about this situation?