motivation

mloxton

 We always say how people and culture are the biggest moving parts in the success (or failure) of KM, and that KM is "about people not tech", so what part does job-focused psychology play in KM?

knowledgize

 A good quote, proverb or saying tells more than a thousand words. During this chat we want to share and collect the best knowledge management quotes out there!

_AxxE_

A popular and endless debate that has animated the minds of all KM’ers (if I may), as to what restricts a KM exercise from succeeding…And it all boils down to the individual stakeholder and the barriers, both internal and external to that individual.

“The Great Wall” is a discussion intended to begin in the generic with rhetoric and eventually touch upon specific questions which are relevant in present times.

1. How & why are individual, organizational, technological and cultural barriers correlated and not mutually exclusive?
2. The earlier the better. In case of new recruits, who are fresh out of college, with little or no KM awareness, how can one impress upon them the importance of KM activities and imbibe in them a habit of knowledge sharing?
3. How effective are incentives in overcoming individual & cultural barriers?
4. How significant a role does knowledge representation play to bridge the gap between the knowledge sharing party and the one at the receiving end, in turn paving the way for  effective knowledge sharing?

leonardkish

Please join us for the #kmers chat on Twitter Tuesday at noon EST where I'll be hosting a discussion of engagement and KM, here's some of the background and some questions to consider (I won't ask them all, but they'll be fun to think about):

There's been a lot of hype about a couple of related words in the tech lexicon over the last year: "gamification" and "engagement".

It's no accident that some of the most successful communities today are gaming communities. Their members are passionate and purposeful, in other words, deeply engaged, both with their games and with their communities. In fact, and some times their games are there communities. They treat the games like a second job.

Gamification is also becoming a real force in the enterprise in hopes of engaging customers and employees. SAP had a big event last week that heralded the beginning of enterprise gamification: j.mp/hE17d0http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/32689/sap-plays-games-with-the-analysts-and-the-gamification-of-the-enterprise-begins/

How can KM leverage these powerful new forces that are being enabled by social media and enterprise 2.0, when communities are everywhere on the Web especially within games? World of Warcraft has a Wiki that is second only to Wikipedia: http://www.wowwiki.com/

The somewhat surprising elements of successful engagement highlighted in Reality is Broken by game designer Jane McGonigal (@avantgame):

• People crave satisfying work.
• The experience, or hope, of being successful.
• People crave social connection
• People crave meaning

Have people used these in a KM context? How successful?

The five motivating factors that I learned in Management class:

1. Sense of Achievement
2. Responsibility
3. Recognition
4. Personal Growth
5. Challenge

How well are these worked into current community dynamics. What have you seen that has worked?

How are motivation and engagement different? Which of these can be used to drive engagement?

Here's a great resource for motivation tied to gaming:

Motivation for Gamificators: http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/bg-p/M...

How about these methods?

http://enterprisestrategies.com/2011/02/22/4-guidelines-for-encouraging-...

What gets people engaged?

There's a multitude of successful communities out there, including this one, that gets people to give of their time and resources.

What's are the top drivers of that involvement?

Can KM get past the 1-9-90 rule with engagement? (Even WoWWiki has a relatively low amount of editors, they say)

What should they be getting from their involvement. Is it just the ability to connect with people with similar passions?

How do real-world leaders compare to network leaders?Are they the same skills or different?

Do networks need leaders to drive passion and purpose, or can it emerge spontaneously?

Can KM get by with collecting artifacts of knowledge?

How can KM get more involved in the flows of knowledge? 

Where do the analytics of these artifacts and/or flows come in?

What does KM as a discipline need to do to move toward flows vs. stocks of knowledge? Original issues with KM were valid because knowledge has to flow. It can't be stored.

What's the half-life of relevancy to a tweet or of most enterprise information? Is there a way to measure or predict it? Is part of the problem with KM that business is not like engineering? It has to form on the fly?

Can communities help with getting the required knowledge in near real time (pair programming is one example)?

We tend to think of KM activities as happening within the enterprise, but how can cross-institutional communities be leveraged for the organization?

About the host: Leonard Kish is a knowledge-focused product manger and sometimes consultant and adjunct faculty on KM. He is the former VP of Operations for Capitis Healthcare, as well as the founder and host of the Rocky Mountain KM Cluster from 2004 to 2005. Lives in Colorado with wife and 2 boys and likes to see how complexity theory relates to organizational design. He's currently exploring gravitational shifts in communities.

Some powerful new forces are at work and he'll be highlighting them on his blog: http://ideasarecheap.posterous.com/todays-explorers-are-innovators . These forces are ultimately related to what drives people and their behavior, so he hopes to learn from KMer community to include in upcoming posts.

Alheri

• Does this link work?
• How can KM embody 'water cooler space' to become a repository for informal stories?
• What would motivate people to participate?

incentintel

Successful knowledge management has traditionally been thought to be a “system” issue. Technology was the solution. Reality is that the technology system is ½ the issue – the other half is human behavior to WANT to share/contribute knowledge. Changing behavior relative to sharing and contributing is as important as the tool.

From Journal of Knowledge Management :

Most companies are finding that leveraging knowledge extremely difficult, and more dependent on building a culture based on effective communicating teams, and interdepartmental trust, than on information technology. (from: 2Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, August 2004 The Relationship Between Social Interaction And Knowledge Management System Success Anthony J. Delmonte, Kennedy Space Center, Jay E. Aronson, The University of Georgia.)

Key to success is getting people to share information.

The questions for the chatters are:

1. Do you see sharing as a barrier to knowledge management?
2. What other behaviors are critical to a successful KM initiative?
3. What have you done in the past relative to increasing participation in KM initiatives?
4. How has participation been rewarded and reinforced?
5. How important is it to have senior managers modeling KM behaviors?

stangarfield

In this week's Twitter Chat we revisit the 13 KM tips of Stan Garfield by highlighting control and motivation issues in knowledge management.

Stan will host a discussion based around 2 of his 13 tips

• Let go of control; encourage & monitor
• Just say yes; be responsive

11 other KM tips from Stan

• Collect content; connect people
• Lead by example; model behaviors
• Tell stories; get others to tell theirs
• Include openly; span boundaries
• Prime the pump; ask & answer questions
• Network; pay it forward & share relentlessly
• Let go of control; encourage & monitor
• Just say yes; be responsive
• Meet less, deliver more
• Enable innovation; support integration
• Try things out; improve & iterate
• Set goals; recognize and reward

khuffman

Knowledge management professionals see ourselves as part of the solution in keeping our organization ahead of the curve. With the explosion of virtual communities since the advent of Web 2.0 social networking models in the consumer sector, how have these same types of collaborative communities played out within organizations? Corporate intranets can play a core role within an organization, enabling an organization to reach the future FIRST. Have you employed virtual spaces internally for your company to foster a more transparent culture of communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing? Do you believe internal communities allow organizations to grow and evolve to gain a competitive advantage? This micro-conversation will center around our stories and on how we view the contribution of online communities to the overall mission and goals of an organization. We will also explore key requirements that must exist within any organization for communities to flourish, influencing factors, community dynamics, and methodologies employed for growing and managing virtual communities.

Resources:

Selection of cards and ideas based on Patrick Lambe's KM Method Cards www.straitsknowledge.com.

Communities: 1) Community of Interest (Type: Approaches / Card #06); 2) Learning Culture (Type: Approaches / Card #18); 3) World Cafe (Type: Methods / Card #37); 4) Open Space Technology (Type: Methods / Card #38); 5) Story Listening (Type: Methods / Card #51).

Models: 1) Email Detox (Type: Approaches / Card #08); 2) Graphic Facilitation (Type: Methods / Card #57); 3) Information Neighborhood (Type: Methods / Card #58); 4) Rewards and Recognition (Type: Approaches / Card #19).

This idea of "Future First" is from "Are you as sick of Sustainability as I am?" by Nathan Shedroff from Design is the Problem (URL: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/sustainable-design/blog/are_you_as_s...). In the blog post about the book Shedroff says, "Sustainability offers those leading companies the opportunity to get to the future first and learn how to keep their differentiation (in products, in brand, and in customer satisfaction) when the rest of their competitors finally find their way to the same spot. If the 'right thing to do' isn't enough, then competitive market differentiation, cost reduction, and risk mitigation should be."

• What types of communities has your organization built and what methodologies for sustaining them worked best? Does your senior management staff participate in online communities? Explain.
• Do you grow your virtual community around information neighborhoods, an arrangement of key information resources for a particular target audience?
• Have you been able to reduce the over-dependency on email and its inefficiencies by introducing more effective channels for collaboration and information sharing? What motivates people to participate?
• When dealing with the "human factor" in KM - are you able to get past the WIIFM (= what's in it for me) attitude to engage staff and encourage them to share their knowledge?
• Have you incorporated a rewards and recognition system?
• Are rewards and recognition based on the contribution of an individual or a group?

jmcgee

Chat Tuesday at 12pm ET In most settings, successful knowledge management efforts depend on knowledge workers adopting new behaviors and turning those behaviors into habits and practices. During implementation and deployment efforts, discussions always arise about how to use incentives to shape new behaviors or how to integrate knowledge management into existing performance management systems. The problem is that these discussions are rooted in the assumption that people respond to incentives as rational economic actors. Recent research suggests that assumption is doubtful at best and may be especially irrelevant to the kinds of behaviors we are interested in influencing for knowledge management efforts.

Q1: How have you seen incentives used in KM efforts? What works? What doesn’t? Q2: Assume incentives don’t work. How would that change the design of KM systems? Q3: Assume incentives don’t work. How would that change the deployment of KM systems?