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…

• Books on-line
• Communities: activity vs. content access
• Open issues for research/thinking on communities

Was struck after a conversation about leadership by the parallels I see between it and parenting (or, at least, the parenting values we tend to choose as a family):

• creating conditions for others to grow without treating them as “small”
• legitimate peripheral participation: creating conditions for learning by observing and participating on one’s own terms in existing practices, rather than telling about how things should be
• seriously addressing nightmares as serious stuff even when you can’t imagine how someone could be afraid of that
• nurturing passions while taking care of safety
• thinking in terms of boundaries and attractors
• telling what is going to happen and discussing the options instead of pulling others along for a pre-arranged trip
• believing that loving care and on-going conversation can get you much further than punishments and rewards
• figuring out how to express love in another’s terms, not in your own

• Mama’s day: Legitimate peripheral participation
• The first dress
• BusinessWeek on stress, collaboration and work-life balance

My company is in transition: what worked in the past doesn’t work anymore and getting a clear picture of the future is not easy. This raises all kinds of issues and emotions that I don’t want to share in this space.

I picked up the quote below a while ago, but was avoiding writing about it. May be I should just quote it:

Matthias Kaiserswerth on Leadership and Followership

When I look what makes a company or country, it is ultimately its people. It is not only the leaders who define strategy and prescribe execution – it is all of us who actually execute and work towards the strategic goals. When things don’t go as planned (i.e., wrong) it is an easy excuse to point to the leaders – but in reality it is each and everyone of us – we’re all responsible. If we follow bad orders, act against common sense and good morals, we’re just as guilty as the people who issued these orders.

It comes down to civil courage, taking personal responsibility and accepting the risk of doing so. If my employees live up to these ideals, I know my organization will work better and be more effective, than if they were just to follow orders without reflection.

• Enabling management oversight in corporate blog space
• Leadership as releasing the energy of others
• Middlespace: predicting and managing bottom-up processes

Song, D., Bruza, P. D., McArthur, R. M., & Mansfield, T. (2006). Enabling management oversight in corporate blog space. AAAI Spring 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs.

Abstract. When a modern corporation empower its staff to use blogs to communicate with colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers, the role of management in exercising oversight and guidance over g public speech of staff becomes dramatically challenged. This paper describes a computational solution to the interpretation of human-readable blog publishing polity documents into semi-automatic disconformance checking of corporate blog entries. The disconformance interpretation is regarded as an abductive reasoning, which is operationalized by information flow computations. Using a socio-cognitively motivated representation of shared knowledge, and applying an appropriate information flow inference mechanism from a normative perspective, a mechanism to automatically detect potentially non-confirming blog entries is detailed. Candidate non-confirming non-conforming blog entries are flagged for a human to make a judgment on whether they should be published. Experiments on data from a public corporate blog demonstrate an encouraging performance of the proposed methodology.

This is one of those in my big “to blog” list (more papers from AAAI 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs). I find this paper interesting for two reasons. First, the methods it uses could be interesting for our own work on topic detection in weblogs (see Anjo’s blog, e.g. here). This one I’ll leave to the specialists (in our team I’m more of a rough quality check: I look at the results of a new method and say if it makes sense given my subjective knowledge behind the dataset :)

The second is more for my own work: it’s an assumption behind the research that what employees of a company say in their weblogs should be controlled by the company (hence developing methods to do so). Although I agree with the authors that weblog posts that do not comply with corporate communication policies can pose significant risks, I’m not sure I would ever want to work for a company that would try to censor my weblog. It’s not the act of censoring that I’m against, but the idea that employees could not be trusted enough to judge.

This corresponds well with the recent post on Enterprise 2.0 Insecurities by Andrew McAfee (discussing the problem from another angle):

people already know how to behave appropriately, and they’re not going to be driven suddenly wild by the appearance of the new platforms

That said, I have to admit that the issue is not an easy one. In one of my drafts I talk about it in a section on business challenges that blogging brings:

Lack of control of company’s message to the external world. Each blogger turns into “self-appointed spokesperson”, communicating with the rest of the world based on own interpretations of corporate policies, interests and risks. This could turn into accidental leaks of confidential information, disrupt “official” public relations or marketing campaigns or create unexpected incidents when business-related information misinterpreted or amplified by media.

So, what might go wrong?

• Corporate policies (and other information necessary for a good judgment) are not necessarily explicit, easy to interpret or communicated well to employees. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to think of any possible situation and describe it in policies at right level of detail.
• Corporate policies and/or bloggers themselves do not take into account specific characteristics of blogging that make it different from other forms of communication (e.g. speed, visibility, persistence) that could make a weblog post on a topic potentially more “risky”.
• Sometimes “bad effects” of a weblog post couldn’t be predicted in advance.
• Bloggers do make mistakes.

What could be done?

• Making sure that those rules that exist are clear and communicated to bloggers.
• Reflect on potential risks (especially those specific to weblogs) and raise awareness about them. Make sure that stories of bloggers about undesired effects of their own blog posts are heard by others. Do not police, but help people to learn making better judgment.
• If you really want to employ preventive text analysis try to turn it into an educating experience. E.g. instead of sending “suspicious post” to a manager for an approval, return it to the blogger with something like “there is a chance that you might be violating company policy regarding information about our stocks – are you sure you want to post it?”. People do use spell-checkers to avoid stupid mistakes, so if positioned properly this might work.
• Think of potential benefits and relax. As said in Russia, those who do not take risks do not get a chance to drink champagne :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/30.html#a1864; comments are here.

• Leadership as releasing the energy of others
• Bloggers Gain Libel Protection
• Why not renaming k-logs?

There is part of my work that I hasn’t been writing much about over last two years. Not because it’s so confidential, but because most of the complexities that I had to face and to learn from are still too complex for a blog post. I am about to disengage from the project to focus on my PhD; I hope I’ll be able to reflect on the things properly one day, but I also need a placeholder for some of the lessons learnt (or, to be more precise for some things where I’ve learnt a lot without having an answer :)

• how your relations with specific people in a project implicitly define the commitments you make and how painful it could be if those unspoken ‘personal constellations’ are changed
• how important is time for developing a shared language, how much you should fight for an opportunity to have it and that the best way to do so is still doing things together and not talking about doing them
• how hard is facilitation of technology adoption, especially if you are already in a technology-mediated settings
• how to make sure things are on track without having the responsibility or means to ‘manage’ (and without doing them yourself ;)
• how to communicate online – hmm, more precisely: how to get ‘optional’ feedback online, how to make decisions asynchronously, how to orchestrate selection of media to fit everyone even if there is nothing there that fits everyone, how not to spam everyone, but still have everyone updated
• how not to be involved, even if it’s good for the project
• how to tame passion
• how to introduce things (slowly :)
• how to balance between decision-making and training
• how to make decisions about technology design with subject-matter experts who don’t know much about technology
• how to write difficult things in email without ruining the relation behind
• how shared working practices could grow in a heavily distributed project
• how to go back and forth between languages; how it is much more than the languages themselves and the need to switch, but the whole cultures and mindsets behind
• how to plan and manage things you can’t plan and manage (community life and support :)
• how to balance paid long-term members and recently joined volunteers in the same team

One day (when I finish my PhD and get back to doing things instead of doing research ;) I will be much better facilitator because of all the experiences above :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/11.html#a1843; comments are here.

• Share your OPML! and hidden weblog readers
• Beginners-friendly communities
• CPsquare open house

Spotted at Chris Corrigan:

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/06.html#a1757; comments are here.

• Leadership as releasing the energy of others
• Communities, shared spaces and weblog reading
• The fun of others blogging for you :)

This came in one of my email newsletters – an article questioning is the UK facing an under-management epidemic?

I did a bit of search to trace the original references – “The Under-Management Epidemic” (executive summary, .doc) from Rainmaker Thinking (US-based research/consultancy/training company):

There has been so much talk about the engagement of workers: Are your employees “engaged” or not? But that’s the wrong question. The key factor affecting employee engagement is the relationship employees have with their immediate supervisors. Therefore, the question you should be asking is this: Are your MANAGERS “engaged” or not? From our ongoing research, we have become convinced that too many of those in leadership positions —-at all levels—- are disengaged from their direct reports on a day-to-day basis. Too many leaders, managers, and supervisors are failing to lead, manage and supervise. [...]

Specifically, we define under-management as a condition in which a leader with supervisory authority (“Manager”), due to influence, inclination, or circumstances, fails to provide regularly and consistently any employee directly subject to that authority (“Direct Report”) with any of the following “Five Management Basics”: (1) Clear statements of performance requirements and standard operating procedures related to recurring tasks and responsibilities. (2) Clear statements of defined parameters, measurable goals, and concrete deadlines for all work assignments for which the direct report will be held accountable. (3)Accurate monitoring, evaluation, and documentation of work performance. (4) Clear statements of specific feedback on work performance with guidance for improvement. (5) Rewards and detriments distributed fairly.

The report covers:

Proportions of under-management – “35% of managers DO NOT provide every direct report with all five management basics even once a year” (refers to the US data, see more in the report on the sample)

The impact of under-management on a manager and his/her reports

Individual causes for under-management

• Lack of time and/or resources
• False “nice guy” syndrome (not accepting responsibility for the authority and influence that comes with managerial position)
• Lack of skill
• Fear

Environmental factors that support spread of under-management – an interesting overview of how all kinds of external forces are reflected in changes of organisational structures and relations inside companies. My favourite bit:

Traditional sources of authority are being supplanted by new sources. Seniority, age, rank, and rules are diminishing. Organization charts are flatter; layers of management have been removed. Reporting relationships are more temporary; more employees are being managed by short-term project-leaders, instead of ‘organization-chart’ managers. Managers are losing their old fashioned long-term hierarchical power, a form of power that (once acquired) required little effort to wield.

Best practices of highly-engaged managers – I feel that this is the most interesting part of the report. Makes sense to read it whole, so just a quote:

They [highly-engaged managers] understand, accept, and even embrace the new reality that managing people has become a day-to-day negotiation.

The report is good inspirational reading if you managing others and it’s definitely worth giving to those who are managing you :)

Related:

• corresponding book
• report on workplace changes – Generational Shift: What We Saw at the Workplace Revolution

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/02/06.html#a1727; comments are here.

• Facilitation lessons learnt
• True knowledge work cannot be automated
• Knowledge worker paradox (2)

Must read: BusinessWeek’s The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard… (via Ingo Forstenlechner).

It’s on many things: long working ours, information overload, overheads of unnecessary communication, social network profiling, knowledge mapping, an even blogs and wikis… A bit too much to mix, but definitely along the lines of the work we do, my PhD research and my personal struggles.

And a quote about things that I believe are behind many of those issues – knowledge work governance and knowledge worker flexibility:

…in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office.”

Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1679; comments are here.

• Public vs. private discussions in communities: research implications
• Bloggers as knowledge animals
• Defining personal KM

More of middlespace – Jeremy Aarons on keynote by Bob Galliers:

Galliers presentation touched on many issues of relevance to my work. In particular he talked specifically about the importance of both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to the development of socio-technical systems. I took his major point to be that a top-down strategy, involving standardised IT/IS methodology, is “necessary but not sufficient” for successful implementation. Here we are in total agreement.

However, I was worried by the way Galliers characterised bottom-up processes as “informal” and “emergent”. The worry is that this seems to imply that these processes are unpredictable and unmanageable, since informal seems to imply that they are not formally understandable, and emergence brings in the idea that these processes are somewhat mysterious.

But I think that the real challenge of knowledge management (or whatever you’d prefer to call it) is precisely how best to manage these bottom-up processes, within the specifications set by the top-down imperatives. Thus characterising them as “informal” and “emergent” really defeats the point – the real challenge is to explore the bottom-up processes in detail, to try to formalise them, and to explore the way they manifest in the broader organizational context. It is on this point that Galliers claimed we were in violent agreement, but I still feel that he underestimates the power of the rhetoric he uses in this case.

I wouldn’t say that the bottom-up processes are predictable and manageable. For sure we can understand them and can try steering in a particular direction, but I guess this would require redefining what “prediction” is and how “management” works. Thinking about sense-making and releasing the energy of others…

Also, Jeremy, what is the point in formalising bottom-up processes?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/12/10.html#a1452; comments are here.

• You just don’t know what you’ll want to know down the road
• Readings on under-management
• On the bursty evolution of blogspace

Martin Dugage:

From Peter Drucker:

Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done

Morning teaser for waking up brains: what are those ninety percent?

Some points from my list (not necessary the most severe ones, but those I care about most):

• Thinking in terms of interventions, not personal productivity (re: personal knowledge management)
• Thinking in terms of formal organisational structures, not social networks and communities
• Measuring what could be measured, not what matters (re: invisible)
• Holding controls instead of giving responsibility to people (re: attitude change)
• Managing weaknesses, not strengths (re: strengths finding)
• Fitting businesses around market changes and equipment life-cycles while forgetting about natural rhythms of people and fun of flow (re: work-life balance)
• Relying on codified knowledge and pushing codification
• Managing conveyor belts, not social ecosystems (re: middlespace)
• Lack of reflection and skills to facilitate reflection of others
• ???

See also: leadership as releasing energy of others

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/04.html#a1412; comments are here.

• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice
• Readings on under-management
• Leadership is pretty much like respectful parenting