For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been getting ready for KMUK, Ark Group’s annual knowledge management event that Victoria is chairing. We’re taking with us a snapshot of our research so far into the evolution of the knowledge manager to share with delegates and speakers. I’m curious to see how it resonates with everyone.
It’s still strange to be this side of the Ark Group coin after spending a good few years working there in the early/mid-noughties. It’s the experiences I collected while working on Inside Knowledge and then at Aon and Ernst & Young that have helped me pick out 11 (I couldn’t settle on 10) threads that run through the conversations we’ve been having.
At dinner this week, my friend Megan pointed out that I have not reported back on my interview with Manuel Flury from SDC in Bern, which is very true and remiss on my part. The full profile is waiting to be written but as I’d been a little nervous of the approach we chose to take, here are my reflections on how we collected Manuel’s KM story.
Manuel met me from Bern train station at midday. He is a tall, bearded gentleman with an open, friendly face and, like many continental Europeans, has an impressive grasp of English (among other languages). We spent the first hour or so talking over a pizza and salad, and then continued the interview walking around his beautiful city.
There was barely a cloud in the sky. The warm sunshine on the 15th-century architecture, tree-covered mountains and the startlingly green-blue river Aare has left me with an enduring technicolour image of Bern.
Beginning the interview at a restaurant felt more natural: table, dictaphone and face-to-face interaction all at hand. But I’m not a fan of interviewing over food. It’s rather unfair on the interviewee who can’t eat and talk, and ends up wolfing down mouthfuls in between questions. The interruptions are also harder to control with waiters, noisy neighbours, jarring music, and, in this instance, a local TV crew filming chefs tossing pizza dough beside our table.
We covered a lot and I quickly realised how little I know about the world of international development. Thankfully, the recording played back Manuel’s stories and examples pretty clearly and we continued talking while walking around Bern for the next couple of hours.
The lapel mic securely fastened, I put my faith back in the dictaphone, and this time upped my listening and retention skills as I no longer had a pad for scribbling questions or comments.
I keep seeing people with ebook readers on the tube and it looks so uninspiring. Here’s what I think you’re missing with a Kindle and why my shelves will always be full:
Books hold the reader’s story too
11:50am 19 April 2011
Manuel Flury heads the Knowledge and Learning Processes Division at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), part of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. A long-time friend of Sparknow, there was never any doubt that we would seek his insights for The Evolving Role of the Knowledge Worker; the question was how best to conduct this knowledge exchange to do his experiences justice.
From a short introductory conversation in March it was clear that Manuel is an open and hugely engaging person with a wealth of experiences to share. He is also about to head back out to the development field in an exciting new role in Ethiopia, which will bring his 10 years in KM at SDC to a close. A 60-minute telephone interview simply would not do.
Knowing that Manuel is a keen walker and that I once put myself through the three-peak challenge, Victoria and Paul suggested we meet in Berne and do the interview while on a walk – perfect.
In preparing for this trip, my challenge has been how to capture our conversations while out and about. It wasn’t until I started thinking about the logistics that I realised how much I rely on the safety of a quiet meeting room, a recording device carefully placed on the desk in front of my interviewee, and my notebook and pens to hand.
On occasion, a man wanders round Brighton with a tiny video camera clipped to his glasses. Not because he’s working under cover or has a worrying voyeuristic streak but because he’s capturing the every day. And every day he films, he says something interesting happens.
Sam and I met about three years ago. I bought one of his paintings on a visit to the seaside and it now lives on my dining-room wall. Since then I’ve taken friends to his London viewings – Susie now has a Hewitt too. I introduced him to George when I found out his company supports artists and to Elizabeth when she was looking for art for the TechHub walls.
Recently, as a thank you for “being determined to help” him, he invited me to the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea where some of his work was on sale. This was unexpected. Not the gesture, but the sentiment, because I haven’t considered myself as being determined to help. I’ve just been making connections when I see them.
It’s the nature of this connection making that’s been niggling at me for some time, especially since working on the knowledge manager’s journey.
Last week I gave a short presentation at Publishing Expo, one of four exhibitions at Earls Court, in a session called ‘Open Source – the way forward?’
The idea was to talk about our technology decisions for the relaunch of the sharedserviceslink.com website, which went live in November and has been a big project for me since last summer.
When I first spoke to Michael Upshall from Consult MU, the session’s chair, I wasn’t sure how much I could contribute. It wasn’t a question we’d spent much time deliberating when choosing a content management system (CMS) and certainly wasn’t something I could debate with a room full of publishing professionals.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether this was even a useful question? If you’re looking for a tool to manage your content, how high up the priority list should it be whether the one you choose is open source or not?
Here’s a snippet from my recent interview with Gordon Vala-Webb, National Director, Knowledge Management at PwC Canada.
We had an animated discussion on how he has seen KM evolve, the skills and tools he relies on, and the explosive impact of social media. But all of a sudden our hour was up.
Before I let him dial off I squeezed in one more question that he could answer when he had more time: what advice would you give someone starting out in KM?
“Easy,” he said. “Don’t do it.” And then he was gone.
Yesterday I helped create a monster. Literally. While I didn’t actually pick any of its features (eyes tangy like pickled onions, hands spindly like spaghetti, a body like a condom filled with walnuts and beautiful feet), I helped vote for its name. The Pedicurous.
I was in a room full of story tellers. Artists, designers, bloggers, authors, sculptors, photographers, role players. I had worried that I’d feel like an interloper, but I think I felt more at home at The Story than I have done at most KM events.
The wonderful McKinsey Quarterly seems to be on the same wavelength as us… there must be something in the water (or something to do with connections suddenly appearing when you’re looking for them) as there are two pieces that resonate.
First, an article on Recovering from Information Overload. As the standfirst says: “Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy.” Nice!
Second, words from Tom Davenport are due next week on how we need to take a strategic approach to rethinking knowledge work. The teaser claims he will offer guidance that will “bring sanity to 21st-century knowledge work”. Yes please. I’m a long-term fan of Tom’s thoughts on KM so am looking forward to this immensely.
Now all I need is some time to read it all and digest what I learn from it…
Last week, Victoria and I met Mohammed Khalid, executive partner at Gartner (I love how that rhymes), and tucked the first interview for the Knowledge Manager’s Journey under our collective belt. Which is lucky, because despite meeting at Carluccio’s and being surrounded by beautifully prepared pasta, our conversation took off at such a rate that we completely failed to order any food.
Before joining Gartner, Khal was global head of knowledge management at the British Council and head of IT services at the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency. He is clear that despite being a technology aficionado he is driven by what it is, culturally, that makes us share and collaborate.
Looking back, it wasn’t my most structured of interviews, but it was fabulously fluid and kept returning to one theme in particular: our diminishing space and ability to reflect or assimilate.
“When you go to a conference, what do you want to get out of it,” he asks (the interviewer/interviewee tables had clearly turned by this point).
Having organised and attended many events over the years, I’ve known the answer to this for a while: I want to get out of the office and into an environment that lets me listen to and discuss what others are doing. I want to stumble upon what I think of as knowledge nuggets: those ‘aha!’ moments and flashes of clarity that elude me while I’m at my desk. And while I do take notes and collect clever charts, it’s those nuggets I really take with me.
But why does a windowless basement make things click?