Personal Confidences, Life Lessons, and Enduring Kindness

Stephen M. Pollan (1929-2018)

On February 11^th the life of Stephen Pollan was celebrated through the story-telling of his many loved ones. We piled into a spartan rotunda sanctuary on a soggy mid-winter Sunday. Each family member blended the banter of the long holiday Pollan family table with the intimacy of Stephen’s confidences. 

Some of the jokes included madcap flights of Stephen basking in his own oblivious regard for social conventions like routine lawn care, daily exercise, and wearing pants. There were deadpan emails about how “your mother and I have decided to remain together” topped off with a “decision to adopt.” His imagination was his mantra. Self-help publishing was his chosen industry and his go-to, primo advice? He recommended – even commanded his flock to make something up:

“Don’t say you don’t know!”

The unanswered question invited a rationale to the inexplicable -- not to the wrong answer. This strategy played out on dual tapings of CNBC programs where he volunteered his son-in-laws as side-kicks and understudy answer men to America’s financial concerns. One of the joys of being at the memorial was the family's invitation to the overflow in the gallery to contribute their own stories -- many drawn from the shared confidences of his appointment-packed advising calendar. It was a fascination to contrast Stephen's disdain for pecking orders, public stigmas, and peer reviews for the multi-dimensional perspectives he offered to his clients.

At home he might putter around in his boxers and thumb his nose at social conventions. Self-cast in the crusader role, he revisited those arbitrary norms in his practice. Much of his work as a professional fear remover meant cluing his clients into the insecurities of the boss and the self-preserving nature of our employers.

He was in our corner. He was leveling with us. What wasn't shared at the memorial were memories of imposing Stephen, his formidable presence in that 1:1 consult, and those classic warning signs in the alarm bells set for plan A graduates lacking in a plan B or a credit reserve:

"Bankers smell blood."

"Your credit rating is your adult report card."

"You live your life – not your job.”

Yes, that was the first direction in the money trail: The job is for the income. Your life is what you do with it. The inference? Confuse the two at your own peril.

I recall these mind-shifting bits of wisdom. It was flattering to have America's answer man as my personal sense slapper-ON-ER. It was sobering enough that adulthood had launched without the opening of my career parachute. Now my loving uncle was splashing cold water on my plans for world conquest. Either way Stephen was intimidating. I needed to come to terms with what college graduates from small elite liberal colleges have been doing since the day they set their sights on the New York City job market, and the only open door is a revolving one.

I severed the connection between career ambition and self-expression. Musings were not bankable assets. Rather it was about counting on the wits – those self-preserving instincts you’re told to “keep about you.” Unfinished college writing projects were not going to pay the freight. Stephen's wake-up call convinced me the creative portfolio was the actual baggage.

That office consult intimacy was much better tailored to a call-in show than to speech-making and lecturing though I feel cheated that I never saw him teach -- an idea he flirted with but don't recall him pursuing.

Outside the clergy, Stephen spent more time inside the trepidation chamber than any counselor – financial, job, life or otherwise. Perhaps that was the spark to what I consider the capstone of his publishing legacy -- Life Scripts, a book about diagramming difficult conversations.

My bumpy transitions and post graduate missteps are not what I remember about Stephen office visits. Nor were the actual answers he provided or advice he gave. It was that mental calculus in the processing between problem and solution. He folded his hands to his chest. He leaned back in his chair, he looked up at the ceiling as if it was an opening to his imagination, and he met your eyes with the reassurance that he had just traveled to the exact place you needed to go.

Sometimes it was whimsical but it was always honest ... except when he left open some wiggle room for teasing.

"I changed someone's life today."

"-- For the better?" Michael would ask.

Michael and I shared an appreciation of a uniquely Stephen-ESQUE superpower on the day before he died. I was rummaging through emails on the train ride into see him, Corky, and the family that day when I came upon a message from the early aughts. In one post he declaring his enormous pride in the achievement of a client I neither knew of or of the actual accomplishment. What struck me was just how personally he had invested in this person, as if their fortunes were entwined.

It's hard to imagine in these hedging and tentative times that someone could be so unguarded in their giving and so fulfilled by it. Stephen gave to causes and many of them were the people whose lives he touched. They showed up as anecdotes in the chapters of the books he wrote with Mark Levine. They were revealed in his big picture understanding of our need for approval, recognition, and most importantly, love. And those folks formed a collective band across the rotunda, a band of love on full display for this memorial and times to come.

Dwelling in these remembrances I recall the unchanneled warmth and affection he lavished on his family and close associates with the measured and watchful guidance he gave me in more formative times. 

In one sense they are two sides of the same kindness – a generosity we all embrace. 

In more recent times I would imagine that my brother’s sons had a very different experience when they sought that same signature guidance. 

Stephen had changed our lives and we all understood how that had changed his – all for the better.

References:

• The Vineyard Gazette
• Go See Your Uncle Stephen
• Go Head, Spends Kids' Inheritance Saus NY Power Guru Stephen Pollan
• Unconventional Advice You Need to Hear

Conclude Me

Jeb "Please Clap" Bush said two memorable things on his race to the bottom of the GOP candidate pack last primary season:

"Donald ... You're not going to insult your way to the White House. That's not going to happen."

"Donald is great at the one liners, but he is a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.”

After yesterday's one man circus act in the East Room, we now know that Jeb is batting 0-2.

I am however willing to bet that the guy he inherited the chaos from was our country's most data-driven chief executive and that Donald is the least. Naturally, I have no actual numbers to base that on I'm as much a prisoner of my own inferential biases as the next NPR filter bubble dweller.

Regardless of how long we have the pleasure of Donald's WWF-style press briefings, I have ceased believing our number 1 duty as citizens is deciding who holds public office. It's not railing against ...

* The jerry-rigged elections

* The gerry-mandered districts, 

* The partisan pandering, 

And who ...

* Holds more eyeballs, 

* Or assets, 

* Or less respect ...

... among members of a Facebook advertising category that contains people who fake text during moments of social awkwardness.  

Nope.

It's to figure out what humans are actually good at. 

I say that because in our + half-century on planet earth, there's no combination of tyrants, typhoons, bad neck ties, single cell terrorists, and yes, loose nukes, that tells me the balance of our days should be lived out under the existential cloud.

So why are anti-anxiety meds the new normal? Sure, there are gobs of fear and anger and despair and antipathy towards Belichick and Brady. But that doesn't explain the gap between the end of common decency and the end of days.

I'm guessing there's widespread silence on the agreement that people make crappy machines. If you look in the classifieds, the owners of capital are not looking for human qualities at all. They're looking for high functioning order takers who are skillful violation avoiders and devoid of personality (Facebook pages affix no smiles upside-down).

Couple that with the individual's need for safety and shelter and we see how our marginal job prospects spiral into the ditch known as lower life expectancy for middle aged white guys. Our actual human personalities are as relevant to our pairing prospects as a 5% unemployment rate. No connection whatsoever.

So I end this grim soliloquy with a crack of sun in the door. People are superior to machines whenever we make the machines do our bidding. Have Facebook log into us if they want our data -- OK, that's still a fantasy but we can scheme. How about the complex relationship between I.C.E and I.S.I.S? The algorithms are not caught up to us there either. Also, we don't have to involuntarily install the Rush to Judgment app like the next guy and gal. We don't need to get stressed out at how we may be judged. It's that stress that blocks the ability of our peers to think critically, i.e. holding two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time. 

Note to selves: machines can't touch that task. Not in our lifetime.

Fellers -- we are now in a world that's no likely to honor critical thinking than  it is to honor the liberty of not belonging to one intolerant tribal judging panel or the next. I can think of no higher calling than Bolishuk to describe our unique place in the gift of each day where we have our collective wits, our independence of thought, and one another.

Happy February 17. And thank you Canuck for your loving cultivation of our artistic legacies.

Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

(c) cbsmiami.files.wordpress.com

Are elections rigged? Maybe. Are they hacked? Could happen. Are they tampered with during shipment and handling? Poll workers and experts say no. What could they be hiding? What we know for sure is that in the era of the permanent campaign cycle...

• We're sick with our own disgust.
• There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form one closely-held secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, how do we identity as citizens?

Are we...

1. Our social media check-ins?
2. The sum of our political contributions?
3. The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

To the electoral machinery the American voter is composed of: (a) a basket of friend requests to (b) one part debt load and (c) two parts gene pool. We know this because we hear about the path to victory and that path is lined with ethnicities, regions, income, and education levels. The boundaries that define our public lives are one in the same as our value to advertisers.

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation, is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider is routinely exposed to groveling at fundraiser dinners and the spoils of privilege. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more unhinged our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publicly worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger. Now square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

It's not just that the status quo works for those in power. It's that the only power the average voter holds is to punish the system with their votes – however many entangled pieces may vaporize before the new administration takes office.

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

• Everyone's a special interest.
• Everyone's a single interest voter.

But no one gets to pick how those single issues are strung together, let alone the candidates for speaking to them. A zero sum game is a ray of sunshine compared to the lose-lose proposition of a Clinton Trump victory. Both candidates defy all precedent in their unfavorables.

Never before have so many in one camp taken collective action to block, deny, and ultimately prevent the will of the other. Whoever emerges will earn a mandate – not to lead but to defend and deflect the howls of protest from the vengeful and affronted. When moral compasses run afoul of legal codes the disenfranchised are not only ostracized but banished from the larger community. The only option between conquest and surrender is the escape of withdrawal – to fantasy elections.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as social conventions are the rules and distractions of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, less-than-instant replays of contested calls, and station identifications for starters.

Why do we want to throttle our  collective attentions – pull them off to the side of the road for the passing ambulance corps – when we can lock into the pay-offs of games called by our plays, players, strategies, and even our own rules. From the first tax loophole to the last tacked on amendment, what can be more American than playing by those?

Fantasy elections tackle another largely unaddressed need and that's a level playing field for rating politicians. Key to this shift is that voters and not fact-checkers are the ratings agencies. Not only do fantasy voters have the same fact base to draw from but they decide which facts on which to make that determination:

1. Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
2. Are they here to entertain us? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
3. Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES! The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate.

In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the one percent and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

With fantasy elections voting freedoms are extended to a list of top ten issues. These picks are not subject to the whim of mass shootings, unscripted gaffes, or other orchestrated surprises. As a set of chronic conditions and tough problems, they are resistant to the whirlpool of visceral gratification that pulses through the cable news circuit. They are not a list to be bought or placated by a power-broker. There will be repeated tallies throughout the play-offs – um, I mean primaries – where fantasy voters can begin linking their leanings to the stances they're hearing on the campaign trail: 

1. Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
   
2. Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
3. Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
4. Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some big data stockpile. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

• So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
• This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged on the merits of our ideals and not the electoral math of our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil: All politics is (not only) local. It's frontal lobal. That's an Election Day fantasy that can bring democracy back to the ballot, no matter who wins tomorrow or presents evidence of rigging on the day after. That's my love-of-country naivete running full mast.

Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

Are elections rigged? Maybe. Are they hacked? Could happen. Are they tampered with during shipment and handling? Poll workers and experts say no. What could they be hiding? What we know for sure is that in the era of the permanent campaign cycle...

• We're sick with our own disgust.
• There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form: (a) a national consensus, and (2) one secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, what is our proper role as citizens?

Are we...

1. Our social media check-ins?
2. The sum of our political contributions?
3. The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

To the electoral machinery the American voter is composed of: (a) a basket of friend requests to (b) one part debt load and (c) two parts gene pool. We know this because we hear about the path to victory and that path is lined with ethnicities, regions, income, and education levels. The boundaries that define our public lives are one in the same as our value to advertisers.

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may well be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider needs no special favor to witness the insider trading, groveling at fundraiser dinners, and the revolving door from elected office to privileged relationships. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more delusional our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publically worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger and square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

It's not just that the status quo works for those in power. It's that the only power the average voter holds is to punish the system with their votes – however many entangled pieces may vaporize before the new administration takes office.

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

• Everyone's a special interest.
• Everyone's a single interest voter.

But no one gets to pick how those single issues are strung together, let alone the candidates for speaking to them. A zero sum game is a ray of sunshine compared to the lose-lose proposition of a Clinton Trump victory. Both candidates defy all precedent in their unfavorables while conspiring to create one of the highest turnouts on record.

Never before have so many in one camp taken collective action to block, deny, and ultimately prevent the will of the other. Whoever emerges will earn a mandate – not to lead but to defend and deflect the howls of protest from the vengeful and affronted. When moral compasses run afoul of legal codes the disenfranchised are not only ostracized but banished from the larger community. The only option between conquest and surrender is the escape of withdrawal – to fantasy elections.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as distraction are the conventions of rules and trappings of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, commercials, and station identifications for starters.

Why do we want to throttle our  collective attentions – pull them off to the side of the road for the passing ambulance corps – when we can lock into the pay-offs of games called by our plays, players, strategies, and even our own rules. From the first tax loophole to the last tacked on amendment, what can be more American than playing by those?

Fantasy elections tackle another largely unaddressed need and that's a level playing field for rating politicians. Key to this shift is that voters and not fact-checkers are the ratings agencies. Not only do fantasy voters have the same fact base to draw from but they decide which facts on which to make that determination:

1. Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
2. Is the candidate an entertainer? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
3. Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES!

The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate. In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the 1% and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

With fantasy elections voting freedoms are extended to a list of top ten issues. These picks are not subject to the whim of mass shootings, unscripted gaffes, or other orchestrated surprises. As a set of chronic conditions and tough problems, they are resistant to the whirlpool of visceral gratification that pulses through the cable news circuit. They are not a list to be bought or placated by a power-broker. There will be repeated tallies throughout the play-offs – um, I mean primaries – where fantasy voters can begin linking their leanings to the stances they're hearing on the campaign trail: 

1. Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
   
2. Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
3. Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
4. Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly white elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some demography-based meat market. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

• So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
• This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged for our ideals and not our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil: All politics is (not only) local. It's frontal lobal. That's an Election Day fantasy that can bring democracy back to the ballot, no matter who wins tomorrow or protests the day after.

KM in the Jerkplace – Postmortem: Crossing the Knowledge Divide

(c) clashdaily.com

Installment Summary:  The series concludes with a reflection on the power of jerks and their confrontational relationship with us – the folks charged with transferring knowledge across cubicles, silos, business units, and generations of would-be collaborators. Those conflicts boil down to an irreconcilable difference between knowledge concentrators and distributors – a rift that favors coercion over dispersion. Ultimately the conflict cannot be resolved by placing knowledge in the corner office but by placing it in the corner of every change agent and meeting table across the organization.

crossing the KNOWLEDGE divide

Over the last seven installments we’ve visited four wildly diverging workplaces united by one thread besides a revenue model, a payroll, a services catalog, and a badging scanner at the front entrance – the decision to pay a smart person with the necessary blend of naiveté and self-confidence to include the term “knowledge” in their job title.

The arguments play out like this:

      Some organizations might say KM distills the essence of the meta-level inference: Who can plausibly oppose knowledge about knowledge?

    

         Who can argue with hiring smart people who consider ivy towers to be silos worth avoiding? Q: I wish we knew what we know? A: Hire a KM guy.

         Who can dispute the fact that the collective organizational brain is both overworked and underutilized – trapped in the hamster wheel of earning-one’s-keep justifications?

Beyond collaboration, efficiency, and shear speed-of-learning, KM is perceived as the bottomless cup of caffeinated process acceleration. It’s also looked at as a hedge against attrition as-in knowledge walking out the door. It’s a container of code; hence the fixation on system knowledge. And as the thesis of this blog series maintains, it’s a protection against the intellectual and emotional vandalism of jerks. That’s because it encourages reciprocity – not simply sharing for its own reward. It promotes transparency to gain trust. It codifies repeatable lessons so they don’t need to be relearned and so the successes they spawn can be reapplied. Is there really any place for jerk behavior to breed in such an empathic setting?

Well … yes.

The problem with this theory is that it crashes faster than the QA server entrusted with your gold-plated production assets. How is it that something that matches patterns as nimbly as it connects the strategic dots fold instantly at the jerk table? That is the looming doubt that shadows each ensuing KM program and the enterprise that failed to support it.

There are ways to fight the power. None of them land more than one separation degree from measurement. Measure the world in units of knowledge and …

·         No one suffers from an abundance of it.

·         If anything there’s a scarcity of it.

What would it take to close that deficit?

Knowledge Needs Know-How to Play Nice With Jerks

The hyphenated answer is know-how. There’s nothing sacred, value-based, or recoverable about knowledge in its static form. It’s a trophy piece – a collectible – until pressed into the service of problem-solving. What’s the most popular one-word definition of knowledge? It’s power. And we appreciate that before we even know what to do with our knowledge.

But here’s the rub. Information wants to be free and knowledge doesn’t aspire to anything. Power closes down dissent and debate. Knowledge is an open book. It’s a quality that many of us covet more than any capture-worthy material or ideal we could ever hope to possess. So here’s the question: How do we get from “free” to “power”? They’re not polar opposites but they’re not exactly complementary. 

Or are they?

If we work among peers who see knowledge as process, then aspirations like team-building, communities of excellence, and end-to-end transformations become a reality we create at work – a channel for reciprocity, a reward unto itself.

That transformation cannot be willed into operation through platitudes or imposed by knowledge czars looking to inflate their knowledge adoption metrics. If the organization sees knowledge as a destination, we’re sunk. Nothing corrupts the power of knowledge more absolutely than treating it like a product.

Closing Arguments

So what do we know about the split between knowledge hoarders and givers? We know that the battle is often a private one. The resolution isn’t decided by competency frameworks and social informatics. Mostly it boils down to proximity to power.

We know that impediments to pooling knowledge are rarely correlated to missing revenue targets. The intention of sharing is likelier to find its way to mission statements than actual boardroom conversation. Yet the transfer of knowledge impacts the downstream verdict on the ultimate workplace rationale: Are our employers anything more than the sum of our paystubs? From a KM perspective it’s not the size of the pay check where the answer lies. It’s an organization’s belief it holds the cards to its own fate.

Here’s now is the conclusion of the lessons learned from the jerkplace.

    6.       Don’t fetishize the look and feel

One of the great misuses of technology is that we get hung up on presentation over substance. Function follows form. We clean data without actually putting it to work. We don’t digest, absorb, or assimilate it into a series of actions or outcomes. That’s not to suggest we can’t have a pretty screen to tease the data patterns out of our work product. But most web design fixates on the interface – not on the interaction itself where the actual substance lives. It’s an uphill argument for KM folks who find themselves sequestered on intranet teams.

     7.       Show the how (and strive for imperfection)

There’s an endless supply of “what” matched with a finite number of “how.” The former is a near certain argue over definitions. The latter is an open invitation to gain interest, buy-in, and eventual leverage with your stakeholders. The difference can best be gauged as the distinction between the collecting of knowledge and the applying of know-how. That’s the cause-and-effect of operational KM. It’s not a static repository that requires data storage and system passwords. It’s a fluid transfer between practitioners trying to shorten the distance between the outcomes they desire and the actions required to trigger them. The imperfection of that process refers to the surprise that comes with the excitement of sharing – not a sure thing or an obvious answer but the corrections and adjustments necessary to match the demand for answers with a responsive supply of prior experience.

    8.       Never fall prey to the messenger’s ego

There is a bias in most news rooms that has little to do with your political bent and everything to do with your speed-to-market. Scooping the competition will not guarantee thoughtfulness or a responsive approach to the news you’re delivering. But it gives your audience the distinct impression of your connectedness to the news-making – even if you’re only collecting the dots and not actually connecting them. If this plays to a KMer advantage it’s that we’re arguing “why” this news flash is newsworthy. Not why it compromises the folks who may sit outside the news traveling circle. One example would be to say why we’re surprised and how it shifts our expectations as we take this new direction onboard with our earlier thinking.

    9.       Be the active observer

KMers are largely institutionalists. They see organizational struggles from the larger, shared perspective. They follow bottlenecks through to the boundaries of matrixed organizations where cross-functional incentives lag behind the need to think holistically. In such structures the interplay of internal divisions inspires uncontrolled layering, overlapping resources, and a lack of cohesion. Each of these shortcomings are sage opportunities for outside intervention. And from an insider view, the KMer is most poised to offer a more open alternative to these ingrained behaviors and parochial tendencies.   

    10.   Do not attempt to influence through threat-making

“OR ELSE …” is an argument that hangs itself when it comes to moving the needle that KM is supposed to thread and stitch into the fabric of how organizations: 1) coordinate internally, and 2) compete in the market. No one’s going to score points for helping the risk-averse to see the KM light or getting right with the knowledge gods. There are few punitive cards in play here, perhaps because there are few dedicated KM departments and even fewer protected from the rigors of quarterly profit-taking. Most KM influence is vested in accentuating the positive impacts of adoption – not the negative consequences of inaction. Regrettably, inaction is referred to life before KM; unfortunate because “before” transitions to “after” if those pilot programs aren’t more widely established.

    11.   11^th Commandment – Know Thy Jerk

         Executive: insecure or boorish?
You would think that the arrival of executive status would usher away the insecurities which drive the promotional cycle. However, this romantic notion cools quickly once our selective company is on the hot seat for timely, specific results.

         Supervisor: protective or insular?
It would seem that one’s immediate superior is the most prevalent command chain positioning for picking fights of a rigged nature or the pulling of rank in the absence of group consensus. Look to expand the stakeholder pool when making the boss look good means being set up to fail by same boss. 

        Peer: controlling or off-the-handle? 
One could easily assume that peer relations inhabit neutral territory and not natural breeding grounds for jerkiness. Maintain the status quo of “doing more with less” is the common mantra of the mid-level manager and it behooves them to cooperate in support of this implicit understanding.

            Subordinate: passive-aggressive or risk averse?

      One might conclude that incalcitrant, immovable forces are not within province of the lower rungs of the pecking order. One could easily equate the junior status of the less experienced staff members as a more exploratory approach to conventional problem-solving. Maybe they tinker with technologies that intimidate their elders or a devil-may-care attitude for attacking chronic or seemingly intractable tech-leaning workplace glitches that KM is expected to resolve.

KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

(c) cybermancy.com/

Installment Summary:  We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media. 

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

1. The plummeting price of storage
2. The proliferation of isolated sources
3. The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

• The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
• Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
• You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

1. An insatiable need for praise,
2. The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
3.  That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.  

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

• Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
• TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how. 

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

   1.       Be a credible ambassador 

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

   2.       Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

   3.       Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

   4.       Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

   5.       Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.