The Right to Self Termination

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="416"] (c) 2012 Michigan Employment Law Advisor[/caption]

There are two kinds of people when it comes to change: (1) those that hate change, and (2) those who dislike it. This includes those who thrive on it (i.e. first responders or management book authors). I count myself in the latter camp although I leave it to the bravado of the rescue squad and the ambulance chasers to rise above their milder disdain for change.

This dislike stance told me to seek out the next change before it found me first. So I opened the door this fall on the "job market" -- two words that always play better in speech and policy-making than in actual qualifiable positions. My forte is in making information useful and I have yet to see a single opening with that line of work involved. Perhaps that's why job security and professional competence have had a casual relationship through-out my so-called career.

No suprise then I was both shocked and delighted to see a position for a reconciliator of enterprise architectures -- someone who could make those disparate systems talk amongst themselves as well as the isolated teams who rely on them for designing products and supporting processes.

The delight kicked in with the realization that I could work from strength as an information architect on behalf of information technologists (the people with the positions to fill in actual job markets). The deal was cinched by the fact this is a product-driven company and thus a culture of politically tone deaf, socially challenged, and problem-smashing engineers.

A Numbers Game of Two Number Teams

I had served the better half of the past two years at the pleasure of CPAs in a Big Four accounting firm that had acquired the operational engineering talents of a mid-size management consulting firm where I did knowledge management via Microsoft SharePoint starting in 2005. Here the main value proposition remained constant: "what do you make?" However the corollaries could not be further apart:

Engineer: How do you make it?
Accountant: How much do you owe on what you make?

One was exact, unbending, and interpreted from an unassailable regime. The other was approximate and multidimensional, and crafted from a fluid and complex set of proprietary assets, market forces, and the immutables, i.e. electronic properties of materials, laws of physics, etc. Accountants and engineers are both introverted, consultative "numbers people." But there's an oil and water schism going on here that makes Arabs and Jews look like ancestral soul mates.

Unlikely Teammates

The guys from my old firm liked to tinker. They liked to take companies apart (batteries not included) and reassemble them so they ran better. They would turn the problem on its head just so they could figure out the right questions to be asking. The tax and audit people have multiple authorities to answer to -- but they never change. It's the same regulated economy from one nation state to the next. Accountants do not review problem sets in search of reductionist logic. They seek "the number." It's the tax code that confers their authority -- not patterns in data, not arrays of silicon nanocrystals. Show an accountant a data cloud as the answer to GPS and he'll be more interested in the cloud's locality than his own whereabouts. It comes with the territory.

The accountant formulates what the engineer rationalizes, assuming the government's a no-show. It might not be the melodic orchestration of a more perfect union. It's an arms length hand-off but a collaboration nonetheless. What I've spent the better half of two years trying to rationalize is how a trade bent on document preparation refuses to practice knowledge management. How it's a higher value function for those documents to be sequestered in a vault than leveraged as the missing piece in some future unsolved puzzle.

So about that new job...

Live and Let Engineer

I could approximate the moment in the interview process where I thought I couldn't walk away from a return to engineering culture. It occurred when my future boss began recounting the tangle of acquisitions that had brought fresh thinking to augment the firm's strategy. But much of that inspiration was trapped in an airtight silo that had never been provisioned to the larger knowledge base. The opportunity was presented as a difficult conversation that no one was especially keen on having, let alone a solution for integrating these silo-bound wikis, file shares, and discussion lists where feudal geeky orders form apart from the larger community. I told the guy that wasn't going to be a problem because I was going to let these coders go on developing in whatever comfort zone met their climate control patterns.

This was not going to be a power grab in the form of:
"You can have any color content so long as it's SharePoint..."

This was about indexing large chunks of undocumented outputs and then auto-classifying them for community review through a federated search. This is the ultimate success factor that us KMers keep a secret to our own detriment. It's not about imposing a single platform. It's about getting on the same page. It's not about shutting down renegade skunk works. It's about opening up the pathways of collective know-how by freeing our users from the tyranny of document location, i.e. knowing where stuff is.

Well, I didn't sound so preachy during the interview and I'm not sure my new boss bought my argument. All I know is he suspected that I believed in what I was telling him. And that was enough to get us to the next round. That's when I tapped my engineering network. Former bosses and colleagues testified that they too drank from the same punch bowl and gave the intrepid, nonplussed tip of operational approval that only an apolitical and resolute dilemma smasher could resolve. These are my people.

As a result I have a once in a lifetime opportunity. It took 50 years. But I finally found a way of firing myself from a job I needed because I found another job I actually wanted. That's a stroke of luck I will value above and beyond any status of vocation or income stream. You don't have to worship a dollar to go to work every day. And you don't need to be (a) starving, or (b) an artist to cherish the intellectual freedom that comes with problem-solving as its own reward.

Now Accepting Business Facebook Applications

 

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="202" caption="Such a deal!"][/caption]

Psst ... hey ... yeah you.

You social engineers getting certified in Business Facebook applications!

Remember what-you-see-is-what-you-get? Probably not unless reinventing yourself for a living is measured in decades. For you digital natives I'm describing how dinosaurs like me once crawled out of our darkened caves of DOS. Back in the late eighties the notion that our interfaces would actually reflect our dot matrix print-outs was an epiphany (that's where our documents were all headed back then, right?)

The great thing about it was you knew where you stood. The outcome on your screen was reproducible. Park that file on a floppy and your friend with the 10 MEG hard drive could see it too. It was the infancy of a new kind of printing press. What we didn't know about the paperless void that awaited us is the security that the paper gave us. We knew how many copies we'd run off, where they'd been circulated, and roughly the profile of the folks who had your layouts, graphics, and arguments in their hands. It wasn't world-wide or moving or making sounds but it was a level of control and transparency that packed the staying power of a flowering Polaroid.

Flash forward to the dawn of "the" Facebook circa 2005:

The moment we decode our thoughts the only thing standing between our expressiveness and the cryogenics archives is the indifference of our colossal and anonymous communities. Until keyboards come equipped with ears for tuning into keystrokes of genius, we'll be banished to "the new dark." Together alone. Old messages. New bottles. Voiceless discoveries wondering whether the people in our social orbits can share in our experience. Quick answer: 'course not! In social media what you see is what you interpret. These are not static inventories of text any more than our connections are a recessive flock of lurkers or even receptive band of onlookers.

Message from 2020 to 2005: There is no audience. If you're looking for distinctions, think engagement levels -- not content consumers.

Okay, back to the here and now.

It's in this cacophony of muffled experiences and tentative expectations that the social media curtain was raised within the confines of large services firms. From one extreme of tight-fisted control, we have leapt to the opposite extreme of unrehearsed community-building. No script. No change management roadmap baked into the recipe for success or even defining what success means.

One critical success factor? WYSIWYG 2.0 gets my knod. If those tentative steps off the social business platform are any indication the number one confronting our reluctant late-comers is not about brushing up on the latest apps and features but preening and probing in that new hall of mirrors:

What can you see that I don't?
What can I conduct in private and then invite a select group of team members at my discretion?  

These are not just passing hesitations for a bashful user base. These are no just executive-level insecurities surfacing as personal vanities. These questions push ahead of any potential opportunity gains or the most basic community-building efforts. Is my avatar out of focus? Are the views I share in my blog out of step with firm policies? Honestly, they can miss the next update cycle if I'm not clear on my WYSIWYG bearings:

"Basically, who can see what? Otherwise I can't tell the noise from the knowledge. Otherwise how do I figure out what's worth investing a part of my work day towards understanding?

There is no single recipe for baking change management into the cultural traditions of a large services organization. But if the adoption of SharePoint 2010 as the de facto enterprise content platform is any indication, then governance is the single biggest ingredient. Of course nothing has forced the issue of who-sees-what out of the maintenance closet  more than SharePoint governance. Chiefly: the deliberations around how corporate policies play out around what gets dragged into or dropped from enterprise interfaces.

If we want to deal with the inevitable as a force for good I would transition what we've learned from our SharePoint deployments. These lessons underscore three overriding factors in the bottom-up adoption of social business media:

1) COMING AND GOING: Connections

Big, impersonal enterprises are famous for counting "who you know" as the way to unblock bottlenecks and transcend their own bureaucracies. Large organizations can be clumsy around the question of how you come to know them. Did you work your way up through the ranks together? Did you stop along the way to sample the broader organization and how smart leaders piece together solutions falling outside the standard portfolio? Did you punch the most direct ticket to partnership, staying closer to the rails and to the exclusion of colleagues with complementary skills and often interdependent needs and resources? The ability of social media savvy managers to self-select their working communities is the most sweeping panoramic view into organizational needs and assets since the invention of the org chart -- and a trifle less static -- no?

2) EXIT: Internal Hierarchies

Remember George W. Bush and the megaphone at Ground Zero. Allies and critics agree. It symbolized the high water mark of his two administrations. My point here? Nothing promotes teamwork better than a big shot tossing off his suit jacket and joining in a bucket brigade. In the case of social business that means pitching in to answer a question or address a concern voiced in an activity stream. In WYSIWYG 2.0 the whole stigma around who should "be seen" with whom  doesn't disappear completely. But a CXO in search of a gut check can now wade into the weeds from the privacy of his corner office or from the primacy of his bully pulpit.

3) ENTER: Market Realities

See the pecking order exiting by the rear door? It's taking another time-honored game not worthy of winning along with it. It's called fixating on internal customers to the exclusion of focusing on actual clients. When the market speaks, it's more eloquent than the most thoughtful governance or the most resolute leadership. It's the clarifying resolution of a win or a sale or a revenue bounce.

Even those porous borders between our work identities and our social media selves can attest to that. After all, if a prospective buyer is looking for guidance on our products and services, who is she going to listen to -- our CEO in the press release or the irate customers sounding off on Twitter? The marketplace has spoken. And it's not waiting for our keyboards to grow ears.

What you see is not necessarily what you get. And what you hear is not necessarily what was said. Unless you hosted what was posted on your social business platform.

Experience Before Branding

Jack Vinson tweeted the following Fast Company rave-up of IBM's entry in the Face Share social media ring. It read like the Gulliver's Travels caught in the virtual web of social nets. All those tiny people are Facebook customers -- aahhh, let me cut loose and wait for Jack to seed my next beanstalk venture, please!

All raves aside it was transparently partisan to Big Blue and I too found myself pulled into the story's gravitation. That's not because IBM is inherently better at social nets than Microsoft. Just that they possess and propagate their own homegrown infernos -- the molten core of critical social mass. When Microsoft eats its own dog food often it's been predigested by a beta pedigree behind someone else's pit bull fence. Not IBM:

"IBM's internal network served as both an incubator and torture test for its latest offering."

Of course, just because IBM cultivates its own crash tests doesn't mean that its dummies don't bleed the same R&D reserves as any other experiential wannabe. Whoever wins at Face share will have the ubiquity to melt the word "social" off the future face of software. And why call it software when it's no longer a substitute for firsthand encounters but "the real thing?"

We'll come to know this in time -- not by some IDC forecast or self-selecting straw poll but by the disappearance of brand IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etal. from the face of experience.

Experience Before Branding

Jack Vinson tweeted the following Fast Company rave-up of IBM's entry in the Face Share social media ring. It read like the Gulliver's Travels caught in the virtual web of social nets. All those tiny people are Facebook customers -- aahhh, let me cut loose and wait for Jack to seed my next beanstalk venture, please!

All raves aside it was transparently partisan to Big Blue and I too found myself pulled into the story's gravitation. That's not because IBM is inherently better at social nets than Microsoft. Just that they possess and propagate their own homegrown infernos -- the molten core of critical social mass. When Microsoft eats its own dog food often it's been predigested by a beta pedigree behind someone else's pit bull fence. Not IBM:

"IBM's internal network served as both an incubator and torture test for its latest offering."

Of course, just because IBM cultivates its own crash tests doesn't mean that its dummies don't bleed the same R&D reserves as any other experiential wannabe. Whoever wins at Face share will have the ubiquity to melt the word "social" off the future face of software. And why call it software when it's no longer a substitute for firsthand encounters but "the real thing?"

We'll come to know this in time -- not by some IDC forecast or self-selecting straw poll but by the disappearance of brand IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etal. from the face of experience.

Taskonomy -- Where Resource Meets Resourcefulness

How does an information architect get their IP connoisseurs to feast on delectable helpings of choice information?

This morning we had an interface designer in to look at our search outputs. We showed him lots of buckets brimming with appointed rounds of patterns and hit counts that speak to the taste, smell, and texture formed by tens of thousands of documents and list items simmering in the stew pot called SharePoint.

But as orderly and configurable as each displayable facet, this designer made me realize the ball of confusion that awaits the untrained eye. No matter how complete the documentation, each bucket spills into a claustrophobic interface. Point and consider isn't quite so convincing as point and click. Every patch of white space already claimed by some rankable re-ordering of some expandable (if not expendable) subtext.

I'd like to think that we stock the best content store that any interface chef could conceivably conjure in devising the smartest possible holding tank for knowledge transfer.

I own that with equal parts frustration and pride. Pride speaks to the hard-won realization that we are not stockpiling content for the sake of collecting it. It's calibrated, populated, and ready for serving. Each artifact passes more than a knowing glance that it's intended for re-assemblages to support some new revenue-bearing endeavor.

The frustration is that our basis for action stumbles in a poorly designed interface. In fact our design is about as kludgy as our metadata is immaculate. Why are we so late to this table? Perhaps there is no rapid translation on intranets from look-and-feel to shop-and-spend? Then again we've squandered resources straying off the SharePoint reservation because of our unwelcoming and cluttered interface.

What we've executed on is metadata and the assertion that an action-based taxonomy is foundational. But the front door that swings open to users can dignify the underlying structure by exposing the proper detail at the moment of instigation -- that user becomes a producer by synthesizing those not-so-raw materials into a refined and unique deliverable.

Whether the end game is simple (the completed form is in my out-box) or glorified (IP creation), it takes the marriage of taxonomy and design to deliver a taskonomy -- that stretchable dimension between what's been conceived and what will become conceivable.

Taskonomy -- Where Resource Meets Resourcefulness

How does an information architect get their IP connoisseurs to feast on delectable helpings of choice information?

This morning we had an interface designer in to look at our search outputs. We showed him lots of buckets brimming with appointed rounds of patterns and hit counts that speak to the taste, smell, and texture formed by tens of thousands of documents and list items simmering in the stew pot called SharePoint.

But as orderly and configurable as each displayable facet, this designer made me realize the ball of confusion that awaits the untrained eye. No matter how complete the documentation, each bucket spills into a claustrophobic interface. Point and consider isn't quite so convincing as point and click. Every patch of white space already claimed by some rankable re-ordering of some expandable (if not expendable) subtext.

I'd like to think that we stock the best content store that any interface chef could conceivably conjure in devising the smartest possible holding tank for knowledge transfer.

I own that with equal parts frustration and pride. Pride speaks to the hard-won realization that we are not stockpiling content for the sake of collecting it. It's calibrated, populated, and ready for serving. Each artifact passes more than a knowing glance that it's intended for re-assemblages to support some new revenue-bearing endeavor.

The frustration is that our basis for action stumbles in a poorly designed interface. In fact our design is about as kludgy as our metadata is immaculate. Why are we so late to this table? Perhaps there is no rapid translation on intranets from look-and-feel to shop-and-spend? Then again we've squandered resources straying off the SharePoint reservation because of our unwelcoming and cluttered interface.

What we've executed on is metadata and the assertion that an action-based taxonomy is foundational. But the front door that swings open to users can dignify the underlying structure by exposing the proper detail at the moment of instigation -- that user becomes a producer by synthesizing those not-so-raw materials into a refined and unique deliverable.

Whether the end game is simple (the completed form is in my out-box) or glorified (IP creation), it takes the marriage of taxonomy and design to deliver a taskonomy -- that stretchable dimension between what's been conceived and what will become conceivable.

Must Ask. Must Tell.

It sounds like a Monty Python sketch.

The most telling search I can use to introduce a new hire to the collaborative dynamics of consulting communities of practice is to shine a bright search light? On display: the compromised zealotry of an overextended consultant who needs the kindred consensual wisdom of the domain experts (a.k.a. group list in MS Outlook) in order to move forward with a proposal.

Even among the most self-assured practitioners the apology always grabs the lead. Every message is prefaced by the "sorry for the SPAM' proviso, meaning Please pardon this untimely interruption. I know I've just potentially added another item for you to check off from your appointed rounds today and it may have little or nothing to do with your own immediate priorities ... until you too seek the endorsements and experience of the crowd sourcing elites and find yourself offering up the same humbled state of manic curiosity.

This is real. This is sincere.

This can also be effective in a systemic and scalable way if the rules of the road are written to include the Must-Ask-Must-Tell ("MAMT") give-back. Before that mating call heads offline and skirts under the radar the information seeker owes it to the betterment of the community to post the most useful responses to SharePoint.

That's how interruptions become know-how pumping arteries into hearts of matters settled many times before. FAQs are not in and of themselves uninformed or brilliant. But frequently answered questions swallowed by poor documentation is a sure sign of a scatterbrained and underperforming community.

To sum it up: MAMT means that if you interrupt your colleagues for advice, the burden falls on the requester to share the counsel and attached IP they receive. if you’re going to spam your colleagues you have an obligation to share what you learn. 90% of all CoP messages have no follow-on thread. That’s not so much due to hoarding but to not wanting to cause further distractions to the community. The answer is to cc: the CoP discussion board (or the KM grunt).

Here's the platitude it serves: Establish leadership communities that inspire and reinforce the sharing behaviors to develop a sharing culture.

I think the social norm – at least in terms of sharing – is maybe 1-2 degrees of separation over email. Any more extended than that and trust factors drift out of one's immediate circle. The model is still in-network. But the collaboration is based more on a friendly rivalry than an extended peer group.

The compliance rate for documenting epic projects has doubled over the past two years. Is that because everyone wants to reinforce sharing behaviors or because no one wants to be seen as an IP freeloader?

Must Ask. Must Tell.

It sounds like a Monty Python sketch.

The most telling search I can use to introduce a new hire to the collaborative dynamics of consulting communities of practice is to shine a bright search light? On display: the compromised zealotry of an overextended consultant who needs the kindred consensual wisdom of the domain experts (a.k.a. group list in MS Outlook) in order to move forward with a proposal.

Even among the most self-assured practitioners the apology always grabs the lead. Every message is prefaced by the "sorry for the SPAM' proviso, meaning Please pardon this untimely interruption. I know I've just potentially added another item for you to check off from your appointed rounds today and it may have little or nothing to do with your own immediate priorities ... until you too seek the endorsements and experience of the crowd sourcing elites and find yourself offering up the same humbled state of manic curiosity.

This is real. This is sincere.

This can also be effective in a systemic and scalable way if the rules of the road are written to include the Must-Ask-Must-Tell ("MAMT") give-back. Before that mating call heads offline and skirts under the radar the information seeker owes it to the betterment of the community to post the most useful responses to SharePoint.

That's how interruptions become know-how pumping arteries into hearts of matters settled many times before. FAQs are not in and of themselves uninformed or brilliant. But frequently answered questions swallowed by poor documentation is a sure sign of a scatterbrained and underperforming community.

To sum it up: MAMT means that if you interrupt your colleagues for advice, the burden falls on the requester to share the counsel and attached IP they receive. if you’re going to spam your colleagues you have an obligation to share what you learn. 90% of all CoP messages have no follow-on thread. That’s not so much due to hoarding but to not wanting to cause further distractions to the community. The answer is to cc: the CoP discussion board (or the KM grunt).

Here's the platitude it serves: Establish leadership communities that inspire and reinforce the sharing behaviors to develop a sharing culture.

I think the social norm – at least in terms of sharing – is maybe 1-2 degrees of separation over email. Any more extended than that and trust factors drift out of one's immediate circle. The model is still in-network. But the collaboration is based more on a friendly rivalry than an extended peer group.

The compliance rate for documenting epic projects has doubled over the past two years. Is that because everyone wants to reinforce sharing behaviors or because no one wants to be seen as an IP freeloader?

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

Merger in the First Degree (and 2nd and 3rd)

The SIKM Boston group convened last week for a lively workshopping session. There was lots of discussion and very little discussion on what to discuss. The focus? What to do when peering straight into the inscrutable eyes of Chess Piece Face. Yes. we're talking about takeovers of the most alien kind across the hostility spectrum. I especially liked the idea that the discussion gravitated to source conjugation:

* First degree: what can I do unilaterally to keep my job?
* Second degree: what can I do to convince you?
* Third degree: how would the disinterested consultant organization counsel their acquirer-client?

The premise starts not with the pieces but the game board. The game we're playing is capitalism and the rules are by, for, and to the owners of capital. Us custodians, gardeners, farmers, bodyguards, and gatekeepers must take in a deep breath and a full step back from our cubes and Outlook boxes at the dawn of a newly waking work day, knowing that the lights may already be turned off.

To be on board is to be prepared to jump ship once the manifesto has passed from one shipping magnet to the next. The crew, however, is not part of the negotiation or even the inventory. To miss that reality is to be held hostage to our own lethargy and inflated sense of importance. Unlike the good captain, we can't go down with the ship. It's not our board to begin with.

Part of the ship-jumping drill is conducted in the self-renewal of our daily vows (including refresher swimming lessons). From the first degree perspective Kate Pugh recommends declaring "a major" to resist being tagged as cargo (overhead). In the consolidations to come it helps to eclipse counterpart "majors" by playing the "best practices" hand in trying to stave off commodity status and marginalization. I concede that the part about personal branding and sucking up to the brigadier smacks of a Fast Company survival guide written by that same doomed captain after the life boats have left for good. Animal magnetism is what seals deals and wins business. There are limits, however, to personal charisma outside the school of self-preservation.

The options seem more leveragable in the second degree where self-declared majors can double as brokers for the teams they've assisted and the projects they've led. One of the more thoughtful second degree contributions to our meeting came from Dave Wallace who spoke in terms of what farmers provide hunters in acquisition terms that is also certain not to show up on a balance sheet:

"How do you reward firefighters for the fires that never happen? he asks. "How can you document that demonstrated ability to diffuse the crises?"

Here it helps to take a page out of Kate's playbook for connecting personal outputs to winning outcomes by elevating those contributions to revenue-generating status. Dave was also quick to address the match-ups and shake-outs around the re-ordering of org charts: who is your equivalent in the new organization? Do they have a higher title, a lower salary band? What expectations do they answer to and what problems do they resolve?"

The third degree is about the ultimate out-of-body merger drama. The active disinterest that speaks to the dispassionate observance for how outsiders advise their conquering clients to carve out the crown jewels of the predatory spoils. Beyond the aggressive cost-cutting that finds a home in bull and bear markets alike there is the need to safeguard the knowledge flows that drive the sales cycles -- not just the profit centers they flow to. I've always carried this implicit understanding with the type A bosses I've supported in their sales efforts. KMA's Mike Gilronan was incredulous how under the radar this realization lands on the operational side: "Some non-revenue-bearing folks don't get it -- How do we justify ourselves?" This is not a rhetorical question to Mike: "Have you ever been held to a quota?"

That unwritten contract trades knowledge flows in the form of competitive intelligence, task-based search results, and accelerated proposal generation for job security. Pure and simple. The easiest way to demonstrate this systemically to an outsider.

That's where the appeal of an enterprisewide tool like SharePoint can play to a farmer's advantage. There's nothing a hunter-gatherer likes better than the map to the treasure -- especially if it spares them any unnecessary turf battles or homegrown improvised explosives designed to blow-up in their faces. That's the beauty of what Chris Rivinus described in my KMWorld Reality Series as the Rorschach test-like properties of SharePoint.

It's a system designed to unify and synchronize all the moving pieces -- prized assets and headcounts alike. Flush the red dye of a bloodless acquisition coup through the SharePoint plumbing and you'll see where the information travels through the anatomical heart of the enterprise. Conversely you'll see the blockages too -- where gangrene is setting into the outer corporate limbs because of information-hoarding, silo-keepers, and other forms of fear, loathing, and clog-hardening lethargy.

Here's a conversation that an acquisition leader and a SharePoint manager can have. It's not "take me to your leader." It's more like the building inspector flushing the pipes to show the rust in the plumbing. That's the kind of knowledge that transcends where the bones are buried and speaks to where the integration needs to happen -- hint: it lies below the financial reporting radar.

Sadie Van Buren referenced the ultimate third degree solution based on a New York City-based copy editor who joined Google Adsense and gamed the vanity results. Every time the agency googled itself it got the gamer's resume. He got his choice of offers.

Dumb Containers

One of the moribund mysteries of KM craft is the conversational impasse that settles in around the question of who can see what.

On first blush this sounds like territorial jockeying between two rival business units. But I think the fear runs deeper while the rationale runs ... shallow. Unlike traditional competition where the enemy integrates our vulnerabilities into a nimble and customer-facing game plan these tender subjects have a lot more to do with vanity and self-preservation than with competitive advantage or go-to-market strategy.

I'm conducting a series of interviews over the coming months for KM World on SharePoint adoption. The focus is not on success but more the fear of success that sandbags so many deployments. I interviewed Marc Anderson of Sympraxis Consulting yesterday. In addition to being a SharePoint integrator Marc is a process management expert who cut his BPM teeth from the Norton Kaplan scorecarding he did with Renaissance Solutions back in the late nineties.

Storing consistently formatted documents triggered by the flow of predictable events is one of those bake-inable gains on the SharePoint adoption curve. But what happens when that reasonable goal becomes a towering expectation? Is a contract really a contract when it was called a statement of work before we merged? Is it my group or yours responsible for unpacking the backlog? Most importantly who's on the hook when our fail safe security policy takes over and "security by obscurity" is replaced by protocol and accountability?

A more interesting question isn't about permissions structures and pecking orders but how to configure SharePoint to reduce cycle times for common tasks. And those requirements extend well beyond back end administration. For instance we can move beyond search results to business results. We can deliver answers instead of documents. We can get beyond the ingrained bias that documents themselves more than the records they contain.

For example what if the golden nuggets within a large involved analysis always land in the same section or sub-clause or roman numeral addendum ad item? Microsoft didn't just add an "X" to .ppts and .xls to make a design statement or an upgrade ultimatum. They did it because XML means never having to hide behind the confinements of file formats. It means being able to chunk content so that granularity happens in the metadata -- not in the mass burial of an endless results list.

These modifications can be done without writing a stitch of XML code too by indexing lists and separating them in the results screen from the PDFs and PowerPoints in our site collection libraries. It means re-importing the familiar laundry lists that service the value propositions of most business proposals so that the value adds and situational specifics are anchored in past success and squared with the needs of the prospect being targeted. Querying against a set of tables makes imminently more sense than trying to pull and retrofit every proposal that's ever deviated from the official script since the beginning of sales cycle time.

More on this as the interviewing calendar unfolds.

Dumb Containers

One of the moribund mysteries of KM craft is the conversational impasse that settles in around the question of who can see what.

On first blush this sounds like territorial jockeying between two rival business units. But I think the fear runs deeper while the rationale runs ... shallow. Unlike traditional competition where the enemy integrates our vulnerabilities into a nimble and customer-facing game plan these tender subjects have a lot more to do with vanity and self-preservation than with competitive advantage or go-to-market strategy.

I'm conducting a series of interviews over the coming months for KM World on SharePoint adoption. The focus is not on success but more the fear of success that sandbags so many deployments. I interviewed Marc Anderson of Sympraxis Consulting yesterday. In addition to being a SharePoint integrator Marc is a process management expert who cut his BPM teeth from the Norton Kaplan scorecarding he did with Renaissance Solutions back in the late nineties.

Storing consistently formatted documents triggered by the flow of predictable events is one of those bake-inable gains on the SharePoint adoption curve. But what happens when that reasonable goal becomes a towering expectation? Is a contract really a contract when it was called a statement of work before we merged? Is it my group or yours responsible for unpacking the backlog? Most importantly who's on the hook when our fail safe security policy takes over and "security by obscurity" is replaced by protocol and accountability?

A more interesting question isn't about permissions structures and pecking orders but how to configure SharePoint to reduce cycle times for common tasks. And those requirements extend well beyond back end administration. For instance we can move beyond search results to business results. We can deliver answers instead of documents. We can get beyond the ingrained bias that documents themselves more than the records they contain.

For example what if the golden nuggets within a large involved analysis always land in the same section or sub-clause or roman numeral addendum ad item? Microsoft didn't just add an "X" to .ppts and .xls to make a design statement or an upgrade ultimatum. They did it because XML means never having to hide behind the confinements of file formats. It means being able to chunk content so that granularity happens in the metadata -- not in the mass burial of an endless results list.

These modifications can be done without writing a stitch of XML code too by indexing lists and separating them in the results screen from the PDFs and PowerPoints in our site collection libraries. It means re-importing the familiar laundry lists that service the value propositions of most business proposals so that the value adds and situational specifics are anchored in past success and squared with the needs of the prospect being targeted. Querying against a set of tables makes imminently more sense than trying to pull and retrofit every proposal that's ever deviated from the official script since the beginning of sales cycle time.

More on this as the interviewing calendar unfolds.

Personal Knowledge Solos and Siloes -- the Uncooperative Side of Collaboration

The most accusational word in the language of KM is "hoarding." This is a label that us true KM believers afix to the folks on the periphery of our SharePoint deployments who don't call or write or reciprocate our calls to pool resources and know-how:

"Don't be a star, be a galaxy," we implore with our open minds and empty SharePoint sites.

Last week one of the directors at my firm posted a simple and direct request to his peers through the our community of practice lists. These email accounts are often called upon for information requests and rarely repatriated when some helpful responses materialize. In other words it's culturally okay to spam your colleagues. But it's not cool to close the loop with the learning you pick-up along the way.

The welcome change in this outcome was that the director saved each response and posted them to the same inbound email list within SharePoint. The result was that lots of undocumented experience was now referencable in a single folder and worth more than all the PowerPoint pile-ons one could ever dump off the deep-end of an abandoned fileshare.

The promises and the perils of community-based discussions are best summed up by Dave Snowden, KM deity and sense-maker of complex adaptive systems. Snowden seems to have the knowledge capital culture of small, elite professional service firms down cold when he posits the all-or-nothing proposition of knowledge requests versus knowledge requirements:

“If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.”

The lesson for knowledge-minders is to design their KM systems around the noninvasive ways that service professionals seek collegial guidance. Even the artifice of re-posting a response is preferable to broadcasting a list of "best response practices" or requiring participation. As Snowden intimates there's no more reliable way to deaden a live discussion.

Here's the link to some of Snowden's other renderings.

Personal Knowledge Solos and Siloes -- the Uncooperative Side of Collaboration

The most accusational word in the language of KM is "hoarding." This is a label that us true KM believers afix to the folks on the periphery of our SharePoint deployments who don't call or write or reciprocate our calls to pool resources and know-how:

"Don't be a star, be a galaxy," we implore with our open minds and empty SharePoint sites.

Last week one of the directors at my firm posted a simple and direct request to his peers through the our community of practice lists. These email accounts are often called upon for information requests and rarely repatriated when some helpful responses materialize. In other words it's culturally okay to spam your colleagues. But it's not cool to close the loop with the learning you pick-up along the way.

The welcome change in this outcome was that the director saved each response and posted them to the same inbound email list within SharePoint. The result was that lots of undocumented experience was now referencable in a single folder and worth more than all the PowerPoint pile-ons one could ever dump off the deep-end of an abandoned fileshare.

The promises and the perils of community-based discussions are best summed up by Dave Snowden, KM deity and sense-maker of complex adaptive systems. Snowden seems to have the knowledge capital culture of small, elite professional service firms down cold when he posits the all-or-nothing proposition of knowledge requests versus knowledge requirements:

“If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.”

The lesson for knowledge-minders is to design their KM systems around the noninvasive ways that service professionals seek collegial guidance. Even the artifice of re-posting a response is preferable to broadcasting a list of "best response practices" or requiring participation. As Snowden intimates there's no more reliable way to deaden a live discussion.

Here's the link to some of Snowden's other renderings.

The Autistic Genius of Microsoft

You’ll never lose an audience tearing down Microsoft, building them up, or equating their product strategy with most high functioning forms of autism. But this post is more personal. It's about Microsoft and me.

No, not "my" Microsoft or even mycrosoft. It was never about that. And we still don't share many interests. But we do share the same initials. We have spent our entire professional lives together. That's something. We don't travel in the same circles. But oh, that shared history! Not even the birth of the World Wide Web could cause us to break-up -- at least not yet.

Is it because in these cold days of flying bottomless on stimulus anxiety at least I can still toggle effortlessly between Excel and Word? Is it because I can wander into the slide shows of colleagues who respirate, fantasize, and fold their pizza box dreams into PowerPoints? Is it because my biggest trading credential is that I suit up on my virtual home turf as power SharePoint user? That's Microsoft and me. Pushing that MS office comfort zone out from the desktop to the enterprise. But not beyond. It was never about that.

Microsoft is the perpetuity of here and now. Before Microsoft perpetual motion was just a theory. But then Bill Gates changed the rules. He didn't design great products or even figure out what customers needed. He invented a new feature called "price" and he slapped one on every boxable shipment. He succeeded at this not because his products were better, faster, cheaper. They were bland, slow, and well ... pricey. They didn't even talk to one another without the next upgrade. But they were personal, like the machines that ran them. Gates franchised out the microprocessor. That's what the wealthiest person in the world does at the turn of this new century. But it's more than that.

When I first started attending programs hosted by the New England Asperger's Association (AANE) at the onset of the oh-ohs (2000s) one of the favorite guessing games was "celebrity Auspies." That's where someone would flag the New York Times article where comedians, actors, and captains of industry admitted to the diagnosis. The implicit conclusion in these confessions? That high-functioning autism was as much the driver in their success as an impediment to their playing nice with the rest of the species. Gates was always the biggest prize:

"Do you think he has Asperger's?" AANE's founder Dania Jeckel would speculate. We'd wonder about his languid speech and his stilted eye contact. We still do.

I'm still on the fence. But I'm not waiting for the lab results to come back on the culture he cultivates. I am certain that Microsoft is Asperger's certified. And I know that because as much as the web grows exponentially from one wireless village to the next there are even greater piles of documentation that will never see the light of 24/7 Internet Day. And those documents are written in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Each one is a personal information silo designed to keep my ownership of each work free and clear of the unruly crowdsourcing that passes for wisdom on the web. It strengthens porous borders against the same hackers that live to disrupt Microsoft code. It guards personal knowledge territories against the globalist elites. It's always been about control. It's never been about communication.

Get inside the heads of users? Actually figure out what they're thinking? That would mean hitting the help key and not having to retell your story to the help index. That would mean that "search" would have never been supplanted by a word that didn't exist before Gates landed at the top of the Forbes list. That word is Google. That would mean expanding the customer base beyond the fringe of IT managers who look down on their internal customers as much as Microsoft does. Communicating like there's some kind of mutual dependency between users and vendors? That would be an original idea. Therefore it will never come from Microsoft.

Gates and me? We're like this. That's Microsoft on the top and me on the bottom.

The Autistic Genius of Microsoft

You’ll never lose an audience tearing down Microsoft, building them up, or equating their product strategy with most high functioning forms of autism. But this post is more personal. It's about Microsoft and me.

No, not "my" Microsoft or even mycrosoft. It was never about that. And we still don't share many interests. But we do share the same initials. We have spent our entire professional lives together. That's something. We don't travel in the same circles. But oh, that shared history! Not even the birth of the World Wide Web could cause us to break-up -- at least not yet.

Is it because in these cold days of flying bottomless on stimulus anxiety at least I can still toggle effortlessly between Excel and Word? Is it because I can wander into the slide shows of colleagues who respirate, fantasize, and fold their pizza box dreams into PowerPoints? Is it because my biggest trading credential is that I suit up on my virtual home turf as power SharePoint user? That's Microsoft and me. Pushing that MS office comfort zone out from the desktop to the enterprise. But not beyond. It was never about that.

Microsoft is the perpetuity of here and now. Before Microsoft perpetual motion was just a theory. But then Bill Gates changed the rules. He didn't design great products or even figure out what customers needed. He invented a new feature called "price" and he slapped one on every boxable shipment. He succeeded at this not because his products were better, faster, cheaper. They were bland, slow, and well ... pricey. They didn't even talk to one another without the next upgrade. But they were personal, like the machines that ran them. Gates franchised out the microprocessor. That's what the wealthiest person in the world does at the turn of this new century. But it's more than that.

When I first started attending programs hosted by the New England Asperger's Association (AANE) at the onset of the oh-ohs (2000s) one of the favorite guessing games was "celebrity Auspies." That's where someone would flag the New York Times article where comedians, actors, and captains of industry admitted to the diagnosis. The implicit conclusion in these confessions? That high-functioning autism was as much the driver in their success as an impediment to their playing nice with the rest of the species. Gates was always the biggest prize:

"Do you think he has Asperger's?" AANE's founder Dania Jeckel would speculate. We'd wonder about his languid speech and his stilted eye contact. We still do.

I'm still on the fence. But I'm not waiting for the lab results to come back on the culture he cultivates. I am certain that Microsoft is Asperger's certified. And I know that because as much as the web grows exponentially from one wireless village to the next there are even greater piles of documentation that will never see the light of 24/7 Internet Day. And those documents are written in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Each one is a personal information silo designed to keep my ownership of each work free and clear of the unruly crowdsourcing that passes for wisdom on the web. It strengthens porous borders against the same hackers that live to disrupt Microsoft code. It guards personal knowledge territories against the globalist elites. It's always been about control. It's never been about communication.

Get inside the heads of users? Actually figure out what they're thinking? That would mean hitting the help key and not having to retell your story to the help index. That would mean that "search" would have never been supplanted by a word that didn't exist before Gates landed at the top of the Forbes list. That word is Google. That would mean expanding the customer base beyond the fringe of IT managers who look down on their internal customers as much as Microsoft does. Communicating like there's some kind of mutual dependency between users and vendors? That would be an original idea. Therefore it will never come from Microsoft.

Gates and me? We're like this. That's Microsoft on the top and me on the bottom.

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

What's a Bad Question? Good Question.

You've heard it before -- especially in a public setting seeded with unfamiliar faces: "There are no stupid questions."

Mostly the moderator who says this is responding to a lack of feedback -- especially when the presentation they gave is either alien or controversial to at least some of the participants.

In all honesty the stupidity lies with the moderator for boxing themselves into an exchange-proof presentation. But if we were even more honest about the kinds of questions that drive search analysts and KM folks batty it's a misinformed question built on the premise of unfounded assertions, urban legends, and generalized assumptions that stretch the appropriateness of their fit too far.

For example it's entirely understandable that some rocket scientist raised on Google believes they could pepper their query with the names of propellants and launchers and then truncate on a few choice biological weapons. What's misinformed about that? Nothing if you're on the web. However if it's done on your firm's SharePoint server and rockets are not what you sell and maintain then you run into two walls right away:

1. Complex question +
2. Uncommon terms =
3. Dumb question

Of course the site admin who sees it is no likely point this out than the search tool itself. Can you imagine buying the Google appliance and for every "zero hit" set of search results the response is "Did you mean to search this on public Google?" The problem metaphorically is that Rocket Star is sticking to his guns by running an ocean-sized search request inside the information pond that is my intranet.

Here's a QA framework I developed that illustrates the response range in terms of the battles worth fighting (stay with the upper quadrants):


Short of remedial information literacy classes the best work-around is to focus on the use of one or two unique terms so that my user can see the lay of the Rocket land in my shop before plundering ahead with anything more esoteric or complex. I can also engineer a search outcome that breaks the question down in terms of the topic addressed. But that works best for blank, receptive brains -- not for domain experts.

Ultimately the best run around the no bad questions mindset is to connect people and dispense with relevancy scoring for documents. Once we're past that we can actually prove what a good question can be. But only by providing a sound answer and people deliver those better than PowerPoints.

What's a Bad Question? Good Question.

You've heard it before -- especially in a public setting seeded with unfamiliar faces: "There are no stupid questions."

Mostly the moderator who says this is responding to a lack of feedback -- especially when the presentation they gave is either alien or controversial to at least some of the participants.

In all honesty the stupidity lies with the moderator for boxing themselves into an exchange-proof presentation. But if we were even more honest about the kinds of questions that drive search analysts and KM folks batty it's a misinformed question built on the premise of unfounded assertions, urban legends, and generalized assumptions that stretch the appropriateness of their fit too far.

For example it's entirely understandable that some rocket scientist raised on Google believes they could pepper their query with the names of propellants and launchers and then truncate on a few choice biological weapons. What's misinformed about that? Nothing if you're on the web. However if it's done on your firm's SharePoint server and rockets are not what you sell and maintain then you run into two walls right away:

1. Complex question +
2. Uncommon terms =
3. Dumb question

Of course the site admin who sees it is no likely point this out than the search tool itself. Can you imagine buying the Google appliance and for every "zero hit" set of search results the response is "Did you mean to search this on public Google?" The problem metaphorically is that Rocket Star is sticking to his guns by running an ocean-sized search request inside the information pond that is my intranet.

Here's a QA framework I developed that illustrates the response range in terms of the battles worth fighting (stay with the upper quadrants):


Short of remedial information literacy classes the best work-around is to focus on the use of one or two unique terms so that my user can see the lay of the Rocket land in my shop before plundering ahead with anything more esoteric or complex. I can also engineer a search outcome that breaks the question down in terms of the topic addressed. But that works best for blank, receptive brains -- not for domain experts.

Ultimately the best run around the no bad questions mindset is to connect people and dispense with relevancy scoring for documents. Once we're past that we can actually prove what a good question can be. But only by providing a sound answer and people deliver those better than PowerPoints.