Running a knowledge market on a teleconference

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —February 22, 2008
Filed in Collaboration

Inspired by a conversation with Chris Young at Thiess, Robyn and I ran a knowledge market activity with our client and their spatial modeller community of practice.

We had three objectives:

  1. Help participants appreciate the nature of what members are keen to share with the community and what members are seeking to learn
  2. Create new connections among community members
  3. Identify knowledge gaps

This is how we did it.

The invite

Before the teleconference we invited all members to email us one thing they were keen to share with the group and one thing they would like to learn from the group. It’s important to emphasise in the invitation that their offering and request should be as specific as possible. Rather than offer “35 years of experience in aeronautical parts design” suggest something like, “I have developed a tool for estimating the …” Look for tools, techniques, stories of success and failure, data, templates. Things community members would value.

Facilitating the session

We compiled the offerings and requests in a spreadsheet and recorded the members name who was offering or requesting.

On the teleconference we gave a quick introduction and described the objectives.

Then we started with the offers. We said something like, “John Smith has a technique he’s developed for modelling motherboards that reduce the likelihood of manufacturing faults. Anyone interested?” People would pipe up and we recorded their names. Sometime the offerer would provide some additional explanation of what was on offer.

After the offers we did a similar thing for the requests.

It generated lots of conversations and you can tell members were sorting out issues and decided to catch up later for a more in depth conversation.

Results

We ran a short survey after the meeting. All 14 attendees responded to the survey. On a scale of great, good, neither good or bad, bad, awful, 2 people rated the meeting as great and 12 rated it as good.

Lessons

Getting people to be as specific as possible is an important factor in successfully running this session.

Let me know if you give it a try. Love to know how it goes for your community.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments

  1. Really nice, thanks for sharing!
    What was the reason (if there was one) for running the offers first? Do you think it would make a difference to run the requests first? ie would it privilege self-interest over altruism?

  2. I ran the offers first because I wanted to show everyone that community participation was about giving and then receiving. Of course it’s hard to tell whether this gesture had any impact and there seemed to be more conversation when we went through the seekers’ requests.

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