Here I am at the KMWorld conference in San Jose CA. Cognitive Edge is running the event, with Dave Snowden coming (but he’s stuck in traffic at the moment), so one of his staff members is starting things off.

The Exercise: Square Post-It Notes
A pad of 3M bright yellow Post-It Notes was handed out to every table. We were asked to introduce ourselves to each other at our round table. We then were asked to take 2-3 Post-It Notes to describe the state of KM in a certain segment or industry. There are 8 people at our table, and about half are from the oil and gas industry. We have people from Canada, Columbia and New Zealand represented, and the others from US.

We then focused on oil, gas and mining:
– still in formative stages with collaboration; how to create a collaborative space for us to work in. The biggest challenge is having a neutral environment for collaboration across multiple companies.
– at the team and specialty level, there has been good technology offered, but too little uptake.

Dave snowden is here. He wants us to take the items we have, and get them clustered on the table (in a square).

Dave said the way to test whether someone is telling the truth, is to get them to tell the story backwards. If they can do it, they are probably telling the truth. If not, there will be significant inconsistencies.

Dave wants us to tell the story of knowledge management pointing out the main turning points. The rule is very simple: you can’t brainstorm them and put them in order. You have to figure out the key turning point that has just happened. Once you have that, then think about the turning point that came before that. We have 7 minutes.

At our table:
– Web 2.0 (2005) … consumers driving the conversation.
– Instant Messaging and Presence (1998)
– Mosaic (1994)
– Industry downsizing … getting rid of records management (1991)
– Lotus Notes (1991)

Now we come to the fun part, says Dave. Come up with two future states: one heaven (so heavenly that it is impossible to imagine) and one hell (we can’t conceive how bad it is). Use blue pads for heaven and orange for hell.

Ideas:
– (heaven) Ubiquitous connectivity across all devices.
– (heaven) Teleporting
– (heaven) plugged into the shared mind; once you know something, everyone knows it
– (heaven) mind reading
– (hell) Apple dies
– (hell) when someone knows something, everyone knows. No competitive advantage.
– (hell) the ability to express everything you know, without boundaries.

The challenge … how do we make heaven happen? Step back to turning points, starting from heaven and going backwards, until you encounter a turning point in the past. You are allowed one turning point that is an
Act of God (in the sense that the insurance companies mean it). And then go backwards from hell, and you are allowed one accident.

Back from heaven:
– genetic manipulation
– chip implants
– neuro science breakthroughs
– (accident) pandemic eliminates 7/8 of world’s population
– ease of global travel

Back from hell:
– (aside) we could go either way on the line, leading from the path from heaven to hell.
– (accident) geo-political crisis

Comments from Dave. Cognitive Edge developed this as an alternative to scenario planning. In most scenario planning, organizations develop 4-5 scenarios that they monitor for, but actually can’t see other things.

If you do this in organizations, and get multiple groups to do this, you put together the various ideas, and look for the common turning points. You can then see where people have a common view of the world. Many of these turning points are failures; and organizations don’t want to repeat these.

The reason for imagining heaven and hell is to imagine the impossible possible. And then work backwards. Shows turning points, and you may see commonalities. Can also show huge mis-matches between groups. (It’s also a narrative based assessment — you are telling stories — and you get 40-60% more details than if you put it in analytical structured framework).

Now let’s look at failure. Some of the work that Dave has been doing is focused on telling stories about failure. The strongest stories are those that focus on failure … people actually read “Worst Practices Databases” rather than “Best Practices Databases”. By telling stories about failure, it provides a stronger motivation to act than best ideas. Eg, ran a coffee safety campaign (how to carry coffee safely) at an oil company, and because we had made people aware of the dangers of carrying liquids, accidents on oil rigs carrying dangerous liquids went down by 40% within a month.

Difference between a London taxi driver (embodies knowledge) and a map (codifies information).

Next and final step … create a teaching story about failure.
– a client deployed a collaboration system. Lots of people started making comments and sharing ideas. Then a senior VP made a comment, “That’s a stupid idea”, and it killed it. Lesson … people need to know that’s it’s safe to share.
– VP of finance wanted to put SharePoint in the organization. Took 2-3 years to get traction, because the CEO wanted a taxonomy in place before he would buy in. We lost an incredible amount of time waiting for this to happen. Didn’t allow emergence, and lost 2-3 years. The CEOs unwillingness to share, it made things very difficult for the rest of the organization.
– Working on a project, directly with people on the front line. Then found out that he had missed out talking to the contracts manager, and so got kicked out in the middle of a desert.

Dave passed around the “story stick” (a digital tape recorder). You can use this method in a group, and tell people to use the story stick when they have a good story to tell … but only if they have already told it to the group.

Stories:
– an organization paid $1 million for a search platform, and then found that the previous system wasn’t installed correctly.
– rolled out Quickbase, and told people how to create databases. Within a very short period of time, no one could find anything.

Conclusion … just imagine how powerful it is when you get a group of people together and swapping stories. Much better than if you give people a best practices database.

(Dave on stories … you have to suck people in, and then give them the message at the end, or without having to explain it).