Knowledge Troubadours

Prof. Fanie de Beer with his infectious passion for knowledge sharing taught us that knowledge troubadours goes beyond the requirement of just sharing knowledge for the good of an organisation but that we should be sharing with a spiritual wisdom that will in time repair society.

Caring becomes key in sharing knowledge in organisations, because when we care we will share with intelligence in order to really improve.

Calculative rationality as the only way of thinking is a thread to society because it does not show us what is missing. We can only see what is missing if we use our spiritual knowledge to try to understand the mysterious. Spiritual in this context actually refers to the human ability to connect things together that are not obvious.

In order to repair society and the problems that we have on earth we need move away from a consuming economy and drive towards a contributive economy.

So much food for thought and quite a bit of philosophy with practical applications. I hope we see prof. Fanie soon at one of our sessions. Thank you for organising him Marietjie

Next Knowledge Conversation - 26 August 2011: SASOL - Communities of Practice

You are invited to attend a session where Armand Oosthuizen and Nico Harmse from SASOL will discuss their approach to Communities of Practice. 

Topics that will be discussed are:
* Short overview of when we started and where we are today (this will also include current activity levels and what technology we are on now) 
* Our COP dev and implementation framework (this will cover issues as; methodology, types of collaboration / communities, technology requirements, etc) 
* Key lessons / Critical Success factors 
* Key Challenges going forward 

The discussion will be held at the:
Thutuka Boardroom
Eskom Academy of Learning
68 Dale Road
Halfway House
You can find a map at http://www.ecc.co.za

Anyone is welcome to attend so you are welcome to extend this invitation to any interested parties. I would just request that you send an RSVP to Joubert.francois@gmail.com by the 19th of August.

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SASOL Technology COP Presentation. 26 August 2011.

 

Filed under  //   COPs   Upcoming event  

How to start and sustain conversations and knowledge sharing (8 July @ Mocha Restaurant)

How to start and sustain conversations and knowledge sharing

Get people talking

  • People (staff) talk more freely when managers are not present, when they have a sense of anonymity.
  • Leave the “door” open so they can come back and talk.

Getting buy-in and cooperation

  • Initially, when launching initiatives/events (where people have the opportunity to share their knowledge with each other), they will always ask “What’s in it for me?” (the “me” factor)
  • The challenges is that people mainly just want to take, take, take.
  • Have a supergroup of users (knowledge ambassadors). Invite the knowledge ambassadors to the launch of the event, get them excited and let the rest take place virally.
  • Viral growth is not automatic – it needs facilitation.

And then what? And what about rewards and incentives?

  • Usually there are lots to talk about in the initial stages of the initiative (perceived immediate value), but people get bored and lose interest.
  • Often times these events take place less and less, and eventually grind to a halt. Should we leave it up to them to ask for the events to take place again? Change the topics? Change the name of the event (rebrand)?
  • Identify drivers of why they need to come back.
  • Keep on challenging people – move the goal posts.
  • They need to understand that they need to challenge themselves (i.e. develop a sense of self-motivation), but the organisation also needs to recognise and reward their efforts.
  • Make technology available, enable staff and give them permission to try things out.
  • Branding/personal branding is important.
  • Make knowledge contributions part of the performance assessment. People should benefit from their contributions, but not be penalised if they do not contribute. Evidence of knowledge contributions is a requirement.
  • Make use of peer assessment to assure the quality of the contributions, but watch out for social grooming.
  • Negative performance should be dealt with.

Change management

We also briefly looked at the five cycles of value creation in communities and networks, as proposed by Wenger, Trayner & De Laat. The conversation focused mainly on aspects related to Cycle 1 - Immediate value. This does not mean that the other stages of value depicted in this article do not apply in our contexts, it is just that we are not so mindful of those. This article provides a framework that will help to recognise and communicate those as well.

Cycle 1: Immediate value – what is my experience of the activities and interactions?
Cycle 2: Potential value – what has all this activity produced?
Cycle 3: Applied value – what difference has it made to my practice, life and context?
Cycle 4: Realised value – what difference has it made to my ability to achieve what matters to me or other stakeholders?
Cycle 5: Reframing value – has it changed my or other stakeholders’ understanding and definition of what matters?

What is RSS?


</object><div style="padding:5px 0 12px">View more presentations from Vaughn Dumas.</div></div>

This briefly describes what RSS is, what it looks like and how we use it at work.

Annabelle, Ronel and Vaugh share more about their experience

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Our feedback

Interesting presentation and bird's eye view on how CoP and networking compliment each other.

The resources adn experts on the subjects will be very helpful.

Discussions with individuals gave a lot of insight and some possible contexts.

More about the human behaviour that motivates or kills networking.

The importance of communities and networks in sharing knowledge.

I learnt that we all have similar porblems/ constraints in terms of using Web 2.0 tools in our professional environments, and that we can learn from each other.

The workshop was very beneficial and important.

The workshop help me to clarify my vision of what I want to achieve. How to map a strategy.

Workshop was very fruitful and informative. I've learned a lot, and I still have to learn more on spidergrams.

I really liked how you effortlessly used KM methods to get the point across. The learning was amazing!

 


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This will help make our community of practice effective, especially the spidergram to evaluate our communication tools.

I appreciate your enthusiasm.

Brilliant! Love the CPD framework.

I would love to have more practical problem solving sessions, e.g. how to achieve success, how to obtain participation, as well as sharing of personal experiences from a variety of situations adn organizations.

The development/ establishment of a 'network' helping those not familiar by providing them with a comfort zone.

A very refreshing workshop completely different from anything I attended before. Stimulating ideas and helped me to spare some thoughts.

Highlight - become aware of diverse processes.

Future - hands-on workshop setting up Twitter/Facebook etc.

I like visualising the idea of the community by drawing the spidergram.

The fishbowl was interesing, listening to the problem as well as the questions.

Thanks!

My take-home message is to experiment small and not wanting something to be perfect from the start.

 

Spend more time on pulling the different concepts together to creatg one pictures (at the end of the workshop).

More examples please?

Workshop was GREAT! 

The spidergram activity was very useful for me.

Thank you for the informative and interesting session.

Hightlight - meeting someone with a similar interest than mine.

Enjoyed the free flow/style of the workshop, the online group checklist (especially the purpose), 'physical' exercises, and having attend a conference workshop with Nancy White!

Many thanx.

 

What it was all about...

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A Wordle.net of the workshop wiki page.

In three words...

At the end of the workshop, Nancy asked us to share our experience in three words. This is what we said -

 

Informative, practice, domain, community, exciting, eye-opening, networking, innovative, informative, excellent, spidergram, community, network, structure, strategy, brilliant, human-spectogram, connection, human-spectogram, networking, eye-opening, birds-eye-view, interact, well-structured, purpose, intensive, reframe, stimulation,  spidergram, experience, networking, closing-triangles, networking, valuable, new perspective, better clarity, networking, eye-opening, exciting, visualize, small experiments, strategy, human behaviour, food-for -thought, purpose, reminders, interesting, pur poseful, fun

Wordle_20110519

Photo

Sent from my iPhone

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