This is something that have been in the blogging pipeline for a while, but thanks to the conversations with John Smith I actually finished it :)

A couple of months ago I went through two different, but somewhat parallel experiences. One is from KM4Dev workshop. During one of the evenings I ended up in a discussion by the core group about the need for a more active – taking charge/leadership – position by the community members. The conversation was stimulating and there were follow-up actions the day after. At the last day I also volunteered to join the core group (which is not very logical for someone new to the community, but I felt like helping out and others were open to see how that would work). Since then I’ve been following the discussions in the core group, realising how difficult it is to figure out how I could add value without being at the community core.

Another experience comes from participating in CPsquare foundations workshop, where modelling of a community life is part of the learning approach. The flow of participation required picking up various leadership roles; I was happy to do so, but in the process had a few hiccups that turned into thinking of how this process could be facilitated.

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I always thought of the leadership in a community of practice as part of the core. As a newcomer you move to the center through legitimate peripheral participation, starting from learning about the community practices by observing, than participating a little, than more and more… The closer you move to the core the more leadership tasks (e.g. welcoming newcomers or organising events) you pick up.

Now I see that view as a problematic, since leadership practices of a community ≠ community practices. Lots of leadership activities are invisible in the daily life of the community (that’s the art of facilitation, too :), so ‘normal’ members, especially newcomers may not know what does it take to make sure that technical issues are resolved, discussions are active and go smoothly, events organised and attended… Also, an ability to help with leadership tasks often requires crossing a boundary: getting admin rights with the tools or joining facilitator meetings and mailing lists. In that respect moving from the core to the periphery in respect to the leadership in the community requires more than being an experienced member.

Of course, it’s not a totally independent process – any meaningful engagement in the leadership tasks requires some understanding of the community practices (that’s why I find contributing to KM4Dev core group so challenging ;). However, you also do not need to move all the way to the core to start contributing (that’s why process facilitators still find a place in communities of practice). The problem is that usually leadership trajectories have to go through the core, because it’s the only way to cross the boundary that gives access to invisible leadership practices. Which not only takes time, but also keeps the workload of existing leaders high, while some newcomers might be happy to help but do not know how.

Now, what could be done to facilitate accelerated leadership trajectories? Make leadership practices in the community more visible, find how to deal with necessary boundaries and facilitate learning.

Some ideas of how it might look in practice:

• Make the need for new leadership visible for everyone. Facilitation in a community is hard and often voluntary work, but lots of it is invisible, so potential new leaders may not realise that existing leaders would very much appreciate help.
• Think of possible leadership trajectories in relation to the specifics of your community and make those visible as well.
• Open up leadership-related discussions when technically possible and politically sensible: invite people to meetings, give access to archives of mailing lists, share summaries of discussions with the community as a whole (most of it is actually done at KM4Dev community, so I’m not very creative here :)
• Ask leaders to articulate their own practices – what does it take and give back, how to do things, what tools to use when, etc.
• Make sure that leadership and participation practices are visible next to each other if there are any written guidelines (e.g. online events: how to participate and how to organise)
• Facilitate leadership-related legitimate peripheral participation by having a pool of small leadership-related tasks that community members can pick up without getting into a bigger commitment

So, what do you think? I’m realising that there should be something on this in the Digital habitats book, but I don’t have it with me…

• CoPs people are becoming aware of weblogs value
• Readings on under-management
• The power of lurking

Fresh from Cognitive Edge accreditation workshops Nancy White and me did an Open Space session to share with the participants of KM4Dev workshop some of the things we had learned about the Cynefin framework.

The Cynefin(pronounced /?k?n?v?n/) framework is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems. The model provides a taxonomy that guides what sort of explanations and/or solutions may apply. It was developed by David Snowden and his collaborators. Cynefin is a Welsh word, which is commonly translated into English as ‘habitat’ or ‘place’, although this fails to convey its full meaning.

We didn’t have that much time for the session, so we started from introducing complex systems, the Cynefin framework, safe-fail probes as an approach to deal with complex domains, and then did an exercise, mapping the issues that come from the evaluation of KM4Dev workshop to the framework.

While I really like Dave Snowden‘s style of introducing the concepts, there is something in it that makes it more difficult to explain them in my own way. Probably the engagement of the stories that turns them into a memorable experience difficult to override… I still have to invent my own examples to talk about complex systems, so I took the birthday party story that Dave tells and turned it into a three-years old birthday party story, thinking of Alexander’s last birthday as I talked :)

If you want to dive deeper into what have been discussed you might want to check:

• Wikipedia on Cynefin framework
• Video A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework by Shawn Callahan
• Publications (those two I find particularly useful, but they are not free; for more options see list of articles by Dave Snowden)
  • Snowden, D.J. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007, pp. 69-76. [free .pdf that is probably not supposed to be there]
  • Kurtz, C. F. & Snowden, D. J. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world, IBM Systems Journal, 42 (3), p. 462.

If you are thinking about using the Cynefin framework in a group process it might be useful to start from reading descriptions of two methods – Butterfly Stamping and Cynefin contextualisation: Four tables. The last one also provides a list of forms that help to think of actions to address items in four domains:

• Action form for Simple domain
• Action form for Complicated domain
• Action form for Complex domain (see also Safe Fail Probes and Safe-fail probes and diffusion of innovations)
• Action form for Chaos domain

• Blog networking study: interviews
• Nancy White on blog communities and more questions
• Blog networking study: dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it bring

Pretty unexpectedly I ended up doing a session on blogging at #KM4Dev workshop. It was part of the social reporting afternoon and was supposed to provide the participants with opportunities to get hands-on experiences with various tools and actually do social reporting of the group work done beforehand.

It didn’t really work that way: we drifted away from blogging as social reporting tool (I’m not surprised, but that’s a topic for another post) and couldn’t practice as some other groups since wifi didn’t want to collaborate. But we had great discussions on how to make blogging work and the potentials of blogging as a KM tool. I was also very happy that Nadejda Loumbeva joined part of the session and shared her blogging experiences, telling most of the things that I’d have to tell otherwise :)

Issues we have discussed (the discussions were pretty unstructured, this is my summary of it :)

• Advantages and disadvantages from personal and organisational perspectives, social reporting with a blog
• How-tos: how to find others, to become visible, to blog on multiple languages, to find time and motivation to sustain blogging over time
• Tech: platforms, possibilities that blog software provides, linking with other tools

Ideally I’d write a few coherent stories to address these issues, but it would take too long, so I’ll just drop some notes and links here. I’m likely to add links in next few days and I do plan to write proper blogposts on sustainable blogging and blogging in a context of social reporting somewhere soon.

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As an introduction – parts from my PhD research that say most of what I was talking about in a condensed format:

• PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments.

See also: page on blogs at KM4Dev wiki.

Why blogging? Blogs support visible individual trajectories

• blogs make personal expertise visible – it helps with finding relevant others and relation building
• blogs are individual rather than topic centered – they provide opportunities to cross topical boundaries and find unexpected ideas and people
• blogs make the process visible, so others can learn from it and can comment on work/thinking-in-progress

Ecosystem and visibility

• why?
  • most of the effects of blogging that people are talking about come from being part of a blogging ecosystem – relations between you and other bloggers and links between your weblog and other weblogs
  • relations grow with time, attention and interactions
  • linking to other weblogs (ideally to specific posts) is extremely important
• how do you get there?
  • find a couple of blogs (e.g. via blogsearch.google.com) and start reading them; follow links and you will discover more
  • comment! make sure comments are meaningful and leave link to your weblog
  • write good stuff
  • monitor who links to your blog (if your blog software doesn’t do it take this example and put your blog address after link: + subscribing to the results via newsreader makes life easier) and continue the conversation
  • connect your weblog to other tools (add link to email signature and social network profiles, add notifications about new blog posts on Twitter, etc.)

Multilingual blogging

• at least make sure that you provide an opportunity to see blogposts and to subscribe to newsfeeds on every specific language
• read Stephanie Booth on multilingual blogging (advanced: more on multilingual online and relevant plug-ins)

• Some thoughts on #KM4Dev
• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice
• #KM4Dev: Cynefin and dealing with complexity

It’s nice to be a newcomer – you can go around, say that you are new and don’t know much and ask stupid questions. This is what I have been doing at KM4Dev meeting so far.

It’s always nice and strange to discover a network of people who do work and think on issues close to those of my own, but were pretty invisible from my perspective until now. Always a nice reminder that my worldviews are filtered by my own network and my usual practices. Glad I went beyond those.

I don’t have a coherent story about things I’m learning, so just bits:

• lots of development work involves funding that always flows in the same direction, creating all kinds of issues around power and taking responsibility
• what happend when the centralised funding runs out? how do we find a long-term intrinsic motivation and resources or a win-win situation within the network to make it sustainable?
• how centralised and decentralised processes could co-exist? how organisational and network structures can co-exist given that their dynamics and reward structures often contradict?
• newcomers moving from periphery to the center, taking responsibility – how do you facilitate the process when the practices in the center are implicitly negotiated?

• Communities, shared spaces and weblog reading
• CPsquare open house
• More on weblogs at WBC04

While lots of people tend to focus on the positive side of finishing a PhD (which is, of course, a great achievement :) I feel more like the one who is just released from a prison. Finally you are free to make choices, but, after spending for so long in a solitary confinement you don’t really know who you are, what you can do, what is out there to choose from and where to start with.

It seems to play at two levels: identity and routines.

Identity

Working on the dissertation forced convergence and focus, but as a result I find it difficult to find a new professional identity. Who am I (next to being an ex-prisoner someone who just completed a PhD)? Where do I belong (next to academia, where I don’t really belong even if I am a researcher)? What are the issues that I want to work on? I didn’t want to believe others when they said that I wouldn’t want to do anything with the topic of my dissertation. Not that I don’t want to talk about blogging anymore, but I definitely don’t want to talk primarily about blogging and especially being known as “the one who knows something about blogging”. [Mark, you were right, I'm working on finding a new story to tell :)]

What I’m trying to do to deal with with one:

• Do things I left for “after the PhD life”, diving into topics and communities that provide complimentary, but fresh perspective on my professional worldview. Ideally as a more or less structured learning experience (I’m starting from Cognitive Edge accreditation course, CPsquare foundations workshop and KM4Dev workshop).
• Find what makes me happy by doing interesting things with interesting people. On a small scale, without worrying too much how would they fit in a bigger professional picture.
• Ask people I trust where they see my experiences and expertise fit.
• All that trying to make sure that I don’t get into too many commitments of what could fit next to regular things at work and in life.

Routines

This is actually the one that’s more challenging: I’m stuck in unproductive routines, being stressed by the amount artefacts, digital and otherwise, that have accumulated in wrong spaces while I tried to focus on the core activities of getting the PhD done and making sure my family survives in the process. There are backlogs everywhere and reading that “high stress environments can cause the brain to rewire itself in ways that reinforce and contribute to ongoing stress” makes it look like vicious circle.

I don’t have a recipe here, but the things that work for me are much closer to FlyLady approach than to GTD, taking baby steps instead of sorting through everything before establishing new strategies and routines:

Your home did not get dirty in one day and it will not get clean in a day either. You have been living in clutter and CHAOS for many years, you are not going to get your home clean in a day. I do not want you to crash and burn. This is why I teach you to take baby steps. If you try to do this all at once, you are going to be mad at me, because this will be like every other “get-organized” method you have tried. I want you to take your time. As you establish one habit, you will very easily be able to add another one to your routines. – FlyLady

While FlyLady approach is aimed primarily at SHEs (Side Tracked Home Executives :), I am looking how the ideas behind it might work where most of my problems are – in a digital / professional sphere. Let’s see…

• Role-playing vs. multiple identities
• Formal/informal interplay (2)
• ALT Spring: Research workshop on lifelong learning