Business Week just published a must-read article called "The Knowledge Handoff: How corporations are scrambling to tap the expertise of baby boomers before they retire." I'm really glad to see this story being picked up. Many of the companies I talk to, from pharmaceuticals to construction, are worried sick over the expertise that is coming up for retirement in the next 10 years. They're desperate to retain it, but don't know how.

Business Week got some important things right here. Most importantly, the stories recognizes that companies won't solve the problem by cramming employees into classrooms and handing aging boomers a piece of chalk. Instead, the article counsels that "companies should encourage soon-to-be retirees to use digital tools like wikis, blogs, and instant messaging." Business Week frames the issue as a generational gap, arguing that boomers need to use high-tech tools to communicate with Gen Y'ers.

Business Week is giving good advice, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that Gen Y'ers can only communicate on wikis and IM. The real insight--the one I wish Business Week had focused on--is that when employees use Enterprise 2.0 tools (like wikis and blogs) to collaborate, they create valuable assets which endure even after their creators have retired. If more boomers did their work in collaborative tools instead of emails and other private forms of correspondence, their colleagues would retain access to their ideas post-retirement. Just think of it as professional immortality.

Professional immortality. If that's not a good reason to use a collaborative tool, I don't know what is.

• |
• Permalink

The other week I flew Southwest for the first time in a while. (I was headed from my home in Philly to Pittsburgh for a customer meeting.) Along the way, I got an interesting and unexpected lesson in the value of self-organization.

Usually, I fly on United (San Francisco is a hub) or USAir (Philly is a hub). Both of those airlines are as traditional as you get, and seating is always a problem. Because I travel on business, I usually book my tickets later than vacation travelers. That means that seat availability is poor, and invariably I get stuck in the back of the plane. I hate sitting in the back of the plane. It's not the back of the plane per se that I hate, but the hassle of getting in and out. I'm a big guy, I usually carry my baggage on the plane, and I'm often rushing to make a business meeting. So I don't like the discomfort of moving down the aisle, and I resent the time that I lose waiting for all those people to get off the plane ahead of me.

Southwest seating works differently. There are no pre-set seat assignments. You can sit wherever is available. You do, however, get a boarding priority assignment based (I assume) on when you bought your ticket and how much you paid for it.

When I got to the airport this morning, I discovered that my boarding priority assignment was a high number. I would be one of the last to board the plane. So I assumed that I would, once again, sit in the back of the plane. Probably in the middle seat.

So imagine my surprise when there were aisle seats available in Row 3 on the outbound flight. On the return, I got an aisle seat in the first row bulkhead. And it's not as though the flight was empty. Roughly 60-70% of the seats were occupied. It just turns out that the seats I like--the ones right up near the front of the plane--aren't nearly as popular as I had always assumed. My co-passengers walked right by them in order to sit in the middle of the plane and towards the back.

Why did the other passengers choose to sit where they sat? Bathroom proximity? More leisurely deplaning?  I have no idea. You'd have to ask them. But clearly their preferences are different from mine. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, we complemented each other's preferences nicely. More importantly, by self-organizing we seem to have done a better job optimizing for everyone's happiness than we do it the old-fashioned way: by having some self-appointed ticketing agent decide where we ought to sit.

Why don't the other airlines do it this way?

More to the point, what can Southwest teach us about the organization of ideas? So often,w e try to do to ideas what United and USAir do to passengers: organize them according to some central notion of where they ought to sit. But what happens when we let the ideas organize themselves? It may sound like anarchy, but then again Southwest's open seating sounds pretty chaotic until you see it in action.

• |
• Permalink

A recent conversation with Brook Manville reminded me of a question that has been puzzling me for a while: Why don't philanthropic foundations think more about networks?

The traditional philanthropic model revolves around money. Foundations have it, and nonprofits need it. So the foundations give it to the nonprofits in the form of a grant. There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's the basic idea.

Money is important, but it's not everything. When I talk to friends and colleagues in the nonprofit sector, what I hear again and again is a desire for knowledge. A charter school in Oakland wants to know whether a particular after-school program is a good use of their limited funding. A clinic in Tanzania wants to know how to increase compliance with a malaria treatment regimen. A music school in Philadelphia wants to know whether it should invest in commercial software to manage its box office.

There are a lot of reasons why nonprofit executives are hungry for knowledge. They work on particularly stubborn problems. The sector is highly fragmented and specialized. The absence of a strong market mechanism and regulating institutions allow bad management practices to endure. But in the end, nonprofit executives are doing what executives in every industry do: trying to learn from the experiences of others to improve their own performance.

If there is one thing that we've learned from the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it's that interpersonal networks are extremely effective in addressing these kinds of knowledge needs. Nonprofit practitioners benefit enormously when they connect with other nonprofit practitioners doing the same type of work. If I'm trying to increase compliance with a particular drug regimen in Tanzania, it is incredibly useful for me to connect with other practitioners who have done (or at least tried to do) the same thing in other parts of Tanzania, sub-Saharan Africa, or the South Side of Chicago. I can learn from their successes and their mistakes, and dramatically accelerate my own learning.

This knowledge transfer is already happening, but not effectively. Face-to-face conferences are expensive and often logistically impossible. In the absence of good public sources of knowledge, personal networks are even more important than in the for-profit sector. But like all personal networks, they don't scale efficiently.

It's not hard to imagine a better way. I'm envisioning an online knowledge networking tool for nonprofits. Nonprofit executives could go there to join discussions, share and access documents, describe case studies, find experts, create affinity groups, etc. Think of it as a standing online industry conference for nonprofit executives. And you don't even have to get on a plane.

Somebody needs to host this party, and philanthropic foundations are the natural hosts. In the near-term, each foundation would create a site exclusive to its funded organizations. Being supported by a particular foundation would not simply be a matter of receiving funding. It would also include an invitation (and a corresponding obligation) to become an active participant in a network of practitioners. The more wisely a foundation invests, the more powerful its proprietary network would become. I could even imagine a time when grant renewal decisions were determined by the quality of a fundee's participation in the network, and when inclusion in a foundation's proprietary network became more important to nonprofits than the accompanying financial support.

Bill and Melinda, are you listening?

• |
• Permalink

One of the questions I get most frequently is: "If anyone can edit a wiki, how do you protect the organization from misinformation or, worse yet, from vandalism." So I was really happy to see the following paragraph in yesterday's New York Times article on Diplopedia, the State Department wiki for the diplomacy community:

What if someone creates disinformation or vandalism? Mr. Johnson was asked in Egypt -- a not-infrequent question when the topic of wikis comes up. He pointed out that unlike Wikipedia, Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down. He then observed, "There are plenty of ways to commit career suicide; wikis are just the newest one." (my emphasis)

Give that man a cigar! (That man is Eric M. Johnson from the State Department's eDiplomacy group.) Vandalism and misinformation may be legitimate concerns on public sites like Wikipedia, especially after high-profile missteps like the infamous Siegenthaler incident. Inside the firewall, however, it's a complete non-issue.

The difference is that inside the firewall, every comment, edit, blog post, and personal profile are automatically attributed by to the author by name--by real name, the name on your door plate, your email, your desk stationary, and your pay stub.

We all have many opportunities every day to flame each other, vandalize each other's work, and spread faulty or under-scrutinized information around the workplace. I could fire off a few choice emails or leave some nasty voicemails right now that would really upset some folks. Why don't I do it? Human decency, professional courtesy and, yes, a desire not to get fired, all have something to do with it. But it's not because I can't.

Until just a few years ago, most workers did not have access to tools which would allow them to mass-publish content to their peers. We now have that access in the form of blogs, wikis, discussion boards, personal profiles, and other collaborative tools. That's a big change. But it doesn't mean that basic standards and behavioral norms will suddenly fly out the window. I'm happy to see the State Department call that out for the myth that it is.

• |
• Permalink

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Socialtext has made another major product announcement: SocialCalc, the first truly wiki-integrated spreadsheet.

SocialCalc has one really big, really obvious benefit over traditional spreadsheets like Excel: it's distributed. In other words, more than one person can work on it at a time. But as ZDNet's David Greenfield and others have pointed out, we're not the first ones to have delivered distributed spreadsheeting.

What's different about SocialCalc--and I think it's really fundamental--is that SocialCalc is integrated into a wiki. You can drop a spreadsheet into a wiki page. You can drop wiki text into a spreadsheet. You can link from a spreadsheet to a wiki page that explains where the numbers came from. In short, you can talk about the numbers.

What a concept...talk about the numbers. If you've done a lot of modeling, you know that the hard part isn't the mechanics of the model; it's the reasonableness and consistency of the assumptions, the accuracy of the inputs, and the strength of the modeling logic. And for all of those things, you need to talk: to your teammates, your colleagues, your data providers, your analysts, etc. A spreadsheet is rarely a one-person affair. Even if one person builds the spreadsheet, the data and thinking that goes into it almost always comes from a broader team of contributors. If those contributors aren't talking about what they're doing, it's just garbage going in. And we all know what garbage in leads to. Talking is also the single best way to spot the spreadsheet errors that Dennis Howlett has so artfully documented.

Our traditional analytical tools--whether Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, or even Google spreadsheets--have done a great job enabling us to crunch the numbers. But they've made it really really hard to talk about the numbers we were crunching. There's no good way in Excel to explain where the figure in Cell I-57 came from. There's no good way to ask whether the growth projection in Y-163 feels reasonable to the rest of the team.

Those of us who have done a lot of modeling come up with our own workarounds. We flag assumptions in a special color. We make cryptic annotations on those little yellow stickies you can add to cells. But those workarounds don't really shed much light. They may serve as useful personal reminders to the model-builder, but they don't usually do much for the rest of the team. If you really want to understand my model, let's face it: I have to walk you through it. If I'm a good and careful modeler, the process is painful and time-consuming. If I'm a sloppy modeler, well...let's not think about that scenario.

SocialCalc enables teams to have conversations about the models they are building. If I want to explain where I got the number in I-57, I can write it in a wiki page. A teammate can question my logic on that same page. If the teammate owns that input, she can change the number, and she can explain her reasoning so I understand it.

Realizing these benefits will, of course, require some new spreadsheet hygene. Modelers will have to start explaining the assumptions behind their models (gasp!). Teammates will have to pay attention to those explanations (double-gasp!). In short, teams will have to start talking about the numbers. With SocialCalc, they finally have a good way to do it.

• |
• Permalink

• |
• Permalink